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Billy Jo
Asked: 2009-06-24 15:10:29 +0800 CST

WinXP - Map network location to local folder

  • 772

I have a network location, \\myserver\myshare. On my Windows XP box, I wish to map this location to the path c:\somefolder. Am I asking the impossible?

networking windows-xp symbolic-link junction

7 Answers

  1. 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)...

    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.

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  2. You are asking the impossible :)

    You need a NTFS symbolic link for what you want.

    Unlike an NTFS junction point (available since Windows 2000), a symbolic link can also point to a file or remote SMB network path.

    SMB2 is required for symbolic links in windows, which is written into the vista/win7 network stacks.

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  3. Probably not the way you're intending. Windows handles symlinks as a physical descriptor. The tool to create them is "linkd" on WinXP. It requires a local filesystem formated for NTFS as a target.

    The closest Windows gets is through DFS. In that case you're creating a special share on a server that your workstation maps to. That share then has its own assembled name-space that's probably what you're looking for. It isn't local, though.

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  4. On Vista (and later) you can create a symbolic link with mklink.

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  5. Best Answer

    The answer is I asked the impossible. There's no way to do what I wanted.

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  6. I havent tried this...and I am not exactly sure what you are talking about, but could you start off with \\127.0.0.1

    THis is just a guess.

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  7. I'm not too sure if this is what you're after, but windows XP can Map Network Drive/Network Folder into a drive (Z:\ etc) but not to a specific folder.

    I'm not sure what you're trying to achieve, but if you have a software that requires access to their files in a local-looking drive, you can do a Map-Network Drive and that should do it for you. (But please take note of Farseeker's answer and the link provided).

    If you simply need a way to access your network drive easily, create a Shortcut directly to the Network Drive (or map the network drive).

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