Mount or dismount a drive

You must be logged on as an administrator to perform these steps.

Mounting a drive is a phrase commonly used to describe an advanced disk management technique that's often used in large organizations. A mounted drive is a partition that's mapped to an empty folder on another partition that has been formatted with the NTFS file system. Mounted drives are typically assigned a label or name instead of a drive letter. They're useful for organizations that need to share partitions or drives with many users. A mounted drive is also known as a mounted folder.

Mounted drives let you extend the storage capacity of a drive or partition. Say you save financial records to the Finance folder on drive C, but drive C is getting full. A separate drive, drive E, has room. By creating an empty folder in the Finance folder called Records, and mounting drive E to the new folder, you can then save files to C:\Finance\Records to take advantage of the extra storage space on drive E. Mounted drives have an advantage over shortcuts because you can move the mounted drives without having to update the folder that the drive is mounted to.

 To mount a drive

1. Click to open Computer Management.  If you are prompted for an administrator password or confirmation, type the password or provide confirmation.

2. On the left, under Storage, click Disk Management.

3. Right-click the drive that you want to mount, and then click Change Drive Letter and Paths.

4. Click Add, click Mount in the following empty NTFS folder, and then either type the path to an empty folder on an NTFS drive or click Browse to locate it. Click OK, and then click OK again.

 To remove a mounted drive

1. Click to open Computer Management.  If you are prompted for an administrator password or confirmation, type the password or provide confirmation.

2. On the left, under Storage, click Disk Management.

3. Right-click the mounted drive that you want to remove, and then click Change Drive Letter and Paths.

4. Click Remove, and then click Yes.

Note

• The Recycle Bin doesn't recognize mounted drives, so if you try to delete a file that's stored in a mounted drive, you might receive an error. To bypass the Recycle Bin and permanently delete the file, click the file, and then press Shift+Delete. When you permanently delete a file, you can't recover it unless you have a current backup copy of the file