Windows 7 / Getting Started

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Different ways to mount a volume

As explained earlier in this section, a hard disk can have one partition or many. Other types of storage devices, such as CD and DVD drives, can only have a single partition. These partitions, regardless of the nature of the physical device on which they're located, are all recognized as volumes by the Disk Management tool and by Windows Explorer.

Mounting is the method by which a volume is made accessible to Windows Explorer and all your applications. In most cases, each volume has its own drive letter, such as C: or D:. But a volume can also be accessed through a folder on any other volume, called a mount point (available on NTFS drives only). Finally, there can be volumes on your system that aren't mounted at all, such as those with filesystems Windows doesn't support and those you don't want to show up in Windows Explorer.

You can change how any volume is mounted, except for the system volume (the one containing your boot files) and the boot volume (the one on which Windows is installed)-these are usually one and the same.

To change the drive letter of a hard disk volume, right-click the partition itself in the right side of the Graphical View pane in Disk Management, and select Change Drive Letter and Paths.

Or, to change the drive letter of a non-fixed disk, such as your DVD drive or flash card reader, right-click the disk in the narrow lefthand column, and select Change Drive Letter and Paths.

In either case, you can choose a new drive letter (e.g., H:) by clicking the Change button. Click Remove if you don't want the drive to show up in Windows Explorer at all. Or, click Add to choose an empty folder as a mount point (or pick a drive letter where there is none).

You can change the drive letter for any device, as well as mount the volume as a folder on another drive, using the Change Drive Letter and Paths dialog.

If you select Mount in the following empty NTFS folder, click Browse to point to an existing, empty folder on a hard disk that already has a drive letter. If you were to mount the volume in the folder C:\backdoor, then the contents of the newly mounted drive would be accessible in C:\backdoor. A folder named some folder on the new drive would then appear as D:\backdoor\some folder. You can view all of the drives mounted in folders by going to View → Drive Paths.