Quincy Center for Technical Education
Computer Technology Department

Using NTFS mounted drives

If you're a member of the Administrators group, you can use Disk Management to connect, or mount, a local drive at any empty folder on a local NTFS volume. You can format a mounted drive with any file system supported by Windows 2000.

When you mount a local drive at an empty NTFS folder, Windows 2000 assigns a path to the drive rather than a drive letter. Mounted drives are not subject to the 26-drive limit imposed by drive letters, so you can use mounted drives to access more than 26 drives on your computer. Windows 2000 ensures that drive paths retain their association to the drive, so you can add or rearrange storage devices without the drive path failing.

For example, if you have a CD-ROM drive with the drive letter D, and an NTFS-formatted volume with the drive letter C, you could mount the CD-ROM drive at an empty folder C:\CD-ROM, and then access the CD-ROM drive directly through the path C:\CD-ROM. If desired, you can remove the drive letter D and continue to access the CD-ROM through the mounted drive path.

Mounted drives make data more accessible and give you the flexibility to manage data storage based on your work environment and system usage. For example, you can:

• Make the C:\Users folder a mounted drive with NTFS disk quotas and fault tolerance enabled, so you can track or constrain disk usage and protect user data on the mounted drive, without doing the same on the C: drive.
• Make the C:\Temp folder a mounted drive to provide additional disk space for temporary files.
• Move program files to another, larger drive when space is low on the C: drive, and mount it as C:\Program Files.