Mount Drives or Partitions as a Folder

How to Mount a Hard Drive or Partition as a Folder in Windows 7​

   Information

This will show you how to mount an existing NTFS drive or partition as a VHD folder in Windows 7. By doing so, this will allow you to use a hard-drive as a normal folder on your main system drive.

This method comes in handy if you made your original system drive too small for your growing software needs or if you just want to be able to access multiple drives via one single drive letter.

Here's How:
1. Create a new folder in 'Drive C' with an appropriate name.

2. Right click on Computer on Desktop or Start-Menu and click on Manage.


3. Click on Disk Management in the left hand pane.


4. Right click on the drive you wish to mount in the middle pane, and click on Change Drive Letter and Paths...

5. In the dialog that pops up click on the add... button.

6. In the new window that pops up click on Browse...

7. In this new dialog navigate to the new folder you created earlier.

8. Click on OK on all of the windows that opened during this tutorial.



This is how my drive space looked before...

This is how my drives free space looks now after installing Test Drive Unlimited which is 6Gb big to the location C:\ProgramsEXT\TDU.
NOTE: Notice how the 6Gb has been added to my drive M instead of drive C.

   Information

If you delete the newly created folder with stuff inside it, the 'virtual' folder is all you delete. any programs or data placed in seperate drives via this method remain in the other drives after deleting the folder.

Related Tutorials

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• How to Unattach and Delete a Virtual Hard Disk in Windows 7
• How to Create and Attach a Virtual Hard Disk in Windows 7

 

[Night Hawk]

Seems to work well here! In fact I just changed the attributes from read only in order to be allowed to copy to as well as from the main storage drive separated from the C drive entirely. It will be interesting to see how that works oiut as well.

 

[enTRAPAG]

Very nice tutorial. Now if they would just let you mount ISO's and other disc image standard natively without 3rd party software, they will be fairly close to Linux functionality. They did give us native ISO burning and that is a huge step in the right direction, so if I nag and send enough feedback, they might even listen.

 

[Night Hawk]

I just saw the 1tb storage mounted on Vista Home Premium 32bit as well. The difference seen in the total drive space used was only 1gb! :shock: It works for those still running both!

 

[rcaruso]

Once attached XP Mode wouldn't start

I found this very helpful and I was able to access the folders on the VHD in Windows File Manager. However, when I went to restart the Virtual Machine XP Mode it gave me an error. Detaching the VHD allowed me to run the VM again.

Is there a way to "have my cake and eat it too?" I have one critical application that only runs under VM and would like to be able to access the files on the VHD in Windows 7 without having to attach & reattach.

If this is not the correct place for this question, please advise.

Many thanks!

 

[jagooch]

Check drive space on drive

How do you check the space usage and use disk tools on a drive that is *only* mounted as a folder? I don't see a way to do this, so I have to add drive letters to the partition as well to know when they are filling up.

 

[kado897]

How do you check the space usage and use disk tools on a drive that is *only* mounted as a folder? I don't see a way to do this, so I have to add drive letters to the partition as well to know when they are filling up.

right click on the folder and open Properties. On the general tab next to Mounted Volume press the Properties button.