Assign USB Drives to a Folder

Posted by Martin in Hardware, Knowledge, Operating Systems, Windows  Tags: , , , ,

28

Mar


Working with several portable USB devices on one computer can be quite complicated when you consider that Windows is assigning the next free drive letter to a device that gets connected. This can lead to some confusion and a great tip that I would like to pass on is to assign USB drives to folders instead.

What I did was to create a main folder on my E: drive which I named USB. I then assigned all my USB devices to subfolders of that folder which led to less confusion on my part. (Create the subfolders before continuing). Here is what I did after creating the folder structure.

Press Windows R, enter diskmgmt.msc and hit enter. This opens the Disk Management configuration that should display all drives and devices currently connected to your computer. Pick an USB device from the list and right-click that entry. Select Change Drive Letter and Paths from the menu.

This should open a new window that is displaying the current drive letter of the device and three buttons at the bottom which are named Add, Change and Remove.

Click on the Add button, select Mount into the following empty NTFS folder and click on browse. Now navigate to the subfolder that you want to assign the usb drive to and confirm the assignment. The USB drive will from now on be accessible from that folder as well if it is connected to the computer.

You can remove the drive letter if you want that by marking it in the main window and clicking on Remove.

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Hack Your Day Productivity | Mount USB drives to folders says, March 28th, 2008   

[...] read exactly how to do this, take a look at the original article on mounting USB drives to folders, I don’t want to take any of the limelight here. [...]

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Daleus says, March 28th, 2008   

Or you could use USBDLM.

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Rarst says, March 28th, 2008   

Windows is indeed assigning next free letter to drive by default, but if you use disk management to manually assign it to some letter - it will remeber that choice for that drive.

So if you map flash drive to some distant from start (unlikely to be occupied) letter - it will always mount on that letter when plugged in.

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Mount USB Drives in Assigned Folders to Keep Them Straight [Windows Tip] » Lifehacker, tips and downloads for getting things done says, March 28th, 2008   

[...] the link for a more detailed explanation and a quick undo fix. Assign USB Drives to a Folder [...]

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links for 2008-03-29 at molgar.net says, March 29th, 2008   

[...] Assign USB Drives to a Folder (tags: hack windows howto usb storage) [...]

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Andrés says, March 29th, 2008   

It doesn’t need to be an USB drive, this works with any kind of drive. It’s useful, for instance, to have your “My Documents” folder in another drive or partition.

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Assign USB drives to a folder « blog del frank says, March 30th, 2008   

[...] USB drives to a folder 30 03 2008 Interessante articolo su come associare un disco o penna USB ad una cartella di Windows piuttosto che ad una lettera di [...]

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Eternalmoonlight.net » Life tips #5 says, March 30th, 2008   

[...] can access multiple USD drives quickly by assigning USB drives to a folder. This method is useful if you have a lot of USB [...]

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Offbeatmammal says, March 30th, 2008   

does this remember the folder assigned to a particular drive is (say) the drive is powered down and then turned on again later?
it would be cool to be able to use something like this to help save power by turning off devices unless you need them but have some certainty where it’s going to re-attach.
Maybe it needs an autorun pgm on the drive itself to do the mapping…

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Josh Miller says, March 31st, 2008   

I wonder if you could use this to keep a persistent “My Documents” or even a whole profile on say a work and home PC via Thumbdrive.

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Assign USB drives to a folder | Development Feeds says, April 2nd, 2008   

[...] Assign USB Drives to a Folder [via Lifehacker] [...]

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Timothy C. Bohen » Assign USB Drives to a Folder says, April 4th, 2008   

[...] Original post [...]

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USBman says, April 4th, 2008   

I’ve got a good one for everybody:

This works great for USB devices (or whatever other physical media you’d like), but diskmgmt.msc does NOT recognize the virtual disks TrueCrypt generates. * Can anyone think of a way to mount TrueCrypt virtual drives to a FOLDER, for the same kind of reasons as someone would do the above tip? *

I’ve dug through various searches and found nothing so far. Please, help!!!

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