Last weekend I bought a 250gb external usb Lifebook to act as a backup drive to replace a crashed drive in my file server. Since my computer was already filling up with drive letters thanks to a network, another external drive, and a media card reader that takes 4 drive letters I decided to map the drive to an empty folder rather than assign it a letter.
Windows XP and NTFS makes this pretty easy. Select Start -> Run -> mmc.exe -> Ok. Then add disk management to the snap-ins. You’ll see a list of drives on the right side. You’ll probably have to reformat the external to NTFS since most USB drives ship formatted in FAT32.
Right click on the disk and select ‘Change Drive Letter and Paths…’.
This will take you to the following screen.
You’ll probably see a drive letter in place of the folder name. You can just remove it. Click on ‘Add…’ to create a new mount point and you’ll see the following screen.
Click on ‘Browse…’ and go to the folder where you want this drive mounted. One catch, the folder where you’re mounting to must be empty. Makes sense of course because as soon as the drive is mounted there the folder will no longer appear empty.
Click Ok and poof, the contents of the drive are now in the folder where you mounted. Personally, I used c:\mnt as my base mount point and have a subfolder called \lifebook1 for the drive I just added.
Cannot Delete Folder
Here is where I ran in to a snag. I could read and write files, add folders, and move stuff around. But I couldn’t delete folders through the mount point. I could delete folders if I was accessing the drive through a letter though.
After much frustration and a posting over at WebMasterWorld.com I found this knowledge base article at Microsoft dealing with the problem. Turns out it is due to Windows trying to move the folder from the mount to the Recycle Bin of C:\ rather than the recycle bin of the removable drive. So, two days later, I figured out you can shift-delete (bypasses the recycle bin) and remove the folder. Of course this deletes it permanently.
And the problem was solved – sort of.
This annoying bug has been around forever. I’ve resorted to just turning off the recycle bin altogether to avoid the issue.
Your article is from 2006: it is not 2008 and MS seems not have created a fix for this.
I use a such mounted partition as a temporary files directory, which I feel to be a great speed, security and safety measure, but this ruins it completely.