The Magic of Drive Mapping

Mapped drives let users easily and quickly navigate a network. Using mapped drives, you can simply point and click to access network resources, whether you're working in Windows Explorer, My Computer, or software application dialog boxes such as Open or Save.

Drive mapping is nothing more than assigning a drive letter to a remote share. Because the drive letter is local, the remote resource appears in My Computer and Windows Explorer as if it were a local resource, letting you access the remote share much more quickly than you can by typing the shared folder's Universal Naming Convention (UNC) name or browsing the network for the folder.

Administrators who teach users how to map drives or who use Windows functions to automatically map drives for users spend less time in Help desk mode. And because some applications exhibit quirky behavior or otherwise don't work well with UNC names, mapped drives are sometimes necessary. However, some administrators don't understand mapping. Others do but don't know the many tricks and shortcuts that they can use to map drives. If you're in one of these two categories, read on to become familiar with the wonderful world of mapped drives.

Using the Windows GUI
The quickest and easiest way to access a share that you want to manually map is through My Network Places. (Keep in mind that you can access My Network Places through Windows Explorer and My Computer as well as through the My Network Places icon on the desktop.) In the treeview pane, expand the view of the computer that contains the share you want to map. Right-click the share and choose Map Network Drive from the shortcut menu to open the dialog box that Figure 1 shows.

By default, Windows 2000 checks the local drive letters in use and offers the next available drive letter in the alphabet for the mapped share. In contrast, Windows Server 2003 and Windows XP start with Z when looking for available drive letters, then work backward through the alphabet. If you don't want to use the offered drive letter, simply specify any other unused letter.

The Reconnect at logon option determines whether the computer will automatically connect to the drive the next time the user logs on to the machine (mapped drives are user settings, not computer settings). The first time you map a drive, the check box is selected by default. Thereafter, Windows remembers the previous state of the option and defaults to that configuration. Unless the user doesn't plan to access the share in the future, you'll typically want to select Reconnect at logon.

Reconnecting to mapped drives during start-up adds several seconds to the startup process and longer if the mapped share isn't available during start-up. A computer's ability to find and reconnect to a drive depends on whether the remote computer has completed its boot sequence. If the remote computer is booting, Windows displays the mapped drive in My Computer (and Windows Explorer) with a red X superimposed on the icon. After the share becomes available, double-clicking the icon quickly connects you to the mapped share, and the red X disappears.

Similar to the Windows RunAs feature, the Connect using a different user name option lets users who don't have permissions to work in a particular share connect to the share through a user account that has the necessary permissions. Users must supply the password of the account. Specify a username and password if you like, then click Finish on the Map Network Drive dialog box. Windows will write the information to the local computer's registry, add the new drive letter to My Computer, and open a window to display the share's contents.

If the shared folder is a parent folder and you expand it to view its child folders, you can't right-click a child folder and map a drive to it. The Map Network Drive command doesn't appear on the shortcut menu for a folder that isn't explicitly shared. You can, however, map the drive from the command line, as I explain later. To remove a mapped drive from a computer, right-click its icon in My Computer or Windows Explorer and choose Disconnect.

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