Windows tip of the week

How to map an empty partition to an NTFS folder

Normally, when you attach a secondary drive to a Windows PC, it gets its own drive letter. But depending on your reason for adding that storage device, you might prefer the option to treat the new drive as if it were a folder on an existing drive.

You might want to do that if you're moving old files from your Documents folder to archive them. You could drag those files into drive G:, but it's even easier if that drive is available as an Archive subfolder in the Documents folder 

To make this change for an existing volume, first create the empty folder you want to use. (This location has to be on an NTFS drive.) Then open the Disk Management console (Diskmgmt.exe), right-click the volume you want to map to that location, and click Change Drive Letter and Paths. Click Add and choose the empty folder you created earlier.

That option leaves the existing drive letter in place. After confirming that the mounted volume works, use the same command but click Change and then remove the drive letter or the mounted folder.