Mapping a drive simply means connecting a local drive to a specially allocated folder or shared folder on another computer. Once a drive has been mapped, you can access the shared resource and treat it as if it were located locally on your computer. Multiple computers can map their drives to this shared resource and take advantage of this networked space. Sound very complicated? Believe me not and right below we will show you how you can quickly set it up and how to use it.
How to map a drive
(This explanation is for Windows XP machines and is mostly unchanged for upgraded versions)
Step 1. To connect a drive from My Computer, click Beginright click My computerthen press Discover. Alternatively, to connect a drive from Windows Explorer, right-click Beginthen press Discover.
The Map Network Drive dialog box gives you a summary of the process as you can see from the screenshot below:
Step 2. Select the drive letter from the drop-down list that you want to use to connect to the shared folder. Enter the UNC path to the shared folder on another computer. A UNC path is just a special naming convention to point to a folder or printer on another computer. The UNC name consists of three parts – the hostname, the share name, and optionally the file path (to access subdirectories if any). These three are joined together using a backslash in this format as: \\hostname\sharename.
Step 3. More convenient, you can also click Browser to find computers and shared resources on your network. This is useful when you don’t know the name of the folder. You can expand Microsoft Network and then expand the computers one by one to see the shared folders.
Step 4. Select Reconnect on login check box if you want the network drive to be permanently connected. Otherwise, the drive you created will ‘unmap’ when you log out of the computer.
Step 5. The networked computer with the shared folder may require a different username and password to log in. Click different usernames link and enter this username and password.
Click Finish to complete the mapping.
With the help of these few simple steps, you can now share resources between computers. You can use applications, read and write to files, and perform all operations as if the shared folder were on your own computer. With cloud-based storage solutions, you can easily map one or even multiple cloud services as network drives.
Have you ever tried mapping a drive? Where is there any problem or is it a smooth drive (pun intended)?
Categories: How to
Source: thpttranhungdao.edu.vn/en/
