Windows – Mount drive with two drive letters instead of one

windows

a co-worker of mine absolutely insists that it's possible to mount a drive in windows server 2003 with two letters instead of one. He's not talking about mounting a drive into an empty ntfs – folder.

example: use ab:\ instead of a:.

I'm pretty sure that's not possible.

I'm working with over 300 windows servers and never noticed that kind of feature. I also cant find any knowledge base or technet article which describes that kind of feature.

Please tell me if it's possible or not. If it's possible please refer to the corresponding knowledge base or technet articles from microsoft.

Thank you very much.

Best Answer

It is not possible. The limit is refered to in this Microsoft support page:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/307889

Because mounted drives are not subject to the 26-drive-letter limit for local drives and mapped network connections, use mounted drives when you want to gain access to more than 26 drives on your computer.

Related Solutions

Windows – In windows, how to mount folder as a drive

You can use the subst command in Windows.

subst m: c:\foo

To make a persistent redirection, you can edit the registry. Add a string (REG_SZ) value to:

HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\DOS Devices

Set the name of the value to the drive letter (e.g. M:), then the data to:

\??\C:\foo\foosub

This method will work across logins and reboots. I tested this on Windows 2008, so it should also work on Vista, XP, 2003 and 2000.

windows – How to Mount Network Drive as Physical Drive

As I said on this (almost) identical question:

Are you sure this is really what you want to do? There's a very good article on why this is a bad bad bad idea over at Joel on Software (see point #3)...

The concluding statement is:

Conclusion: the next time someone tries to sell you a programming product that lets you access network resources the same was as you access local resources, run full speed in the opposite direction.

If you want to know why, read the relevant parts of the article.

And the short answer to your question is: No. Not easilly, and the reason is that a local disk is expected to have all sorts of functionality that a network share does not. A local disk expects a local file system (NTFS/FAT/etc), which a network share does not have (Well, it does, but at the server it's hosted on, not your location), as well as a whole host of other features that just can't be safely or reliably replicated (see the linked artical).

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Windows – In windows, how to mount folder as a drive

windows – How to Mount Network Drive as Physical Drive

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