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If you are a Microsoft Windows user, then you most likely use File Explorer to manage your files and folders. And you are probably familiar with the concept of drive letters used to designate your hard drives or the partitions\volumes on your hard drive if you have more than one.
Now let’s say you have a folder that you are constantly accessing or saving files to, and you want a shortcut to get to that folder for easy access. Of course, you can create an actual shortcut to that folder but then you need to have that shortcut easily accessible as well. Or maybe you need to access that folder via the command line and don’t like having to navigate to it each time you need to use it. In this article we will be showing you how to mount a folder as a virtual drive with a drive letter in File Explorer. That way you can access a specific folder just as easily as accessing the drive itself.
To mount a folder as a virtual drive in File Explorer, we will be using the Windows command prompt to configure it. The folder we want to mount as a virtual drive will be located our our E drive at E:\Work Files\In Progress and we want to assign it the driver letter W.
We will open a command prompt by typing CMD in the Windows taskbar search box and choose Command Prompt from the list. Here is the command to mount the folder.
subst X: “C:\path to folder”
You will need to change X to the drive letter you want to assign to the mounted folder and then change the path to the actual folder you want to have mounted with a drive letter. So in our case, we will use the following command (be sure to use the quotes).
subst W: “E:\Work Files\In Progress”
You will not see any confirmation and if you do not receive any errors, you can assume that the command ran successfully.
To see your mounted folder and any other folders that you have mounted as a virtual drive, you can use the subst command by itself to view them.
Now when we go back to File Explorer and to This PC, we can see our new W drive along with our other drives.
One thing you will notice is that the total space and free space will match the drive that contains the folder that you have mounted. Since our mounted folder is on the E drive, the W drive matches the space values as well as the drive name (Data). You will not be able to rename the virtual drive and if you rename the source drive, the name of the virtual drive will be updated to match.
If we open the W drive in File Explorer, we will see the files that are located in our source folder (E:\Work Files\In Progress).
If we open command prompt to the W drive and run the dir command to show the contents of the drive, we will have the same files and folders.
One downside to mounting a folder as a virtual drive is that when you reboot your computer, it will no longer be mounted when you log back in. But if you were to do something like save the command as a text file, you can easily copy and paste it into a command prompt and remount it. You can even do something such as create a batch file and have it run at startup.
If you want to unmount your virtual drive without having to reboot, all you need to do is use the following command. Just replace X with the drive letter you used for your virtual drive.
subst X: /d
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