Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
Volume Mount Points
Volume mount points
enable you to access a volume as a folder
in another volume instead of by using a drive letter. The volume that holds the folder serving as
the mount point must be an NTFS volume, and the folder must be empty. In UNIX and Linux,
mount points rather than drive letters have always been used to access disk volumes, so users of
these OSs should be quite comfortable with mount points. Windows volumes can be assigned
both a mount point and a drive letter, if needed. Some reasons for using mount points include
the following:
• Extend the apparent amount of free space on an existing volume. For example, a Windows
XP or Vista user uses several applications with large multimedia files. These files are stored
in the Documents (My Documents in Windows XP) folder in the user's profile on the C
drive. The C drive is getting low on disk space, so a new disk is installed. Instead of assign-
ing the disk a drive letter and copying the user's documents to the new volume, you can
mount the volume in a folder under the user's Documents (My Documents) folder. New files
can be added to this folder, thereby maintaining the user's normal working environment.
• Consolidate frequently accessed volumes. For example, you have a computer with two
hard disk volumes, C and D; a DVD volume, E, where you keep a reference DVD; and a
flash drive, F, which you use to transfer documents. You can create a folder to act as a
mount point for each drive in your Documents folder on the C drive so that you have
access to all data in these volumes in a convenient location.
• Consolidate several shared volumes under a single network share. Instead of having sev-
eral different share names that users must remember, you can have a single shared folder
containing each volume as a mount point. In this way, users have access to all shared vol-
umes through a single share.
Activity 6-3: Using a Volume Mount Point
Time Required:
10 minutes
Objective:
Make a volume accessible by using a mount point.
Description:
You have created a volume to which all users need access. You already have a
shared folder that users can access through a mapped drive, and you don't want to complicate
matters by adding another mapped drive. The solution is to mount this new volume as a folder
in the existing shared folder.
1. Log on to your server as Administrator, if necessary.
2. Open the Computer Management MMC, and then open the Disk Management snap-in. Right-
click the
QData
volume and click
Change Drive Letter and Paths
. Click
Add
. Click
Browse
,
click to expand the
C
drive, and then click the
TestShare
folder you created in Chapter 3.
3. Click
New Folder
. Type
QData
to change the folder name, and then click
OK
twice. Notice
that QData is still assigned the drive letter Q. The drive letter can be unassigned, but as is,
the QData volume can be accessed by using both the drive letter and the mount point.
4. Right-click the
C
drive and click
Explore
. Double-click the
TestShare
folder to verify that
QData is mounted there. Notice that the mount point is represented as a drive icon with a
shortcut arrow.
5. To test network access to the share and mounted volume, log on to your Vista computer as
testuser1
with
Password01
. Click
Start
, type
\\serverXX\testshare
in the Start Search text
box, and press
Enter
. You should see the QData folder in TestShare. Network users don't
see the drive icon, so QData being a mounted volume isn't visible to network users.
6. Close all open windows and log off your Vista computer.
Shadow Copies
Like quotas,
shadow copies
are enabled on an entire volume. When this
feature is enabled, users can access previous versions of files in shared folders and restore files
that have been deleted or corrupted. You configure shadow copies in the Shadow Copies tab of
a volume's Properties dialog box (see Figure 6-4). Shadow copies are disabled by default.
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