How to Map a Network Drive

This article shows step for step, how to map a network drive. This is useful for establishing a connection to a remote drive as if it were a local hard drive letter.

Click on the Start Menu, and Right Click on the "My Computer" icon and choose "Map Network Drive...".

Choose what Drive Letter you want to assign to the Mapped Network Drive. In this example, we are assigning it the "J:" letter.

In the "Folder" box, enter the location of the network drive. In most cases, it will be in the format of "\\10.171.8.12\c$" where "10.171.8.12" is the IP address of the Remote server, and "c$" is the name of the network share you want to connect to. You can also click the Browse button to locate the network share if the servers are in the same workgroup. If the drive you are mapping is a WebDAV site, then enter the full URL in the "Folder" box (e.g. "http://files.example.com/").

Click "Finish" once you have selected the Drive Letter and Folder Location. Optionally you can also specify a different username and password to connect to the remote drive if the current logged in user does not have permissions to the resource. You will be prompted for a Username and Password if the current user does not have permissions to the remote resource.

You can now access the remote network drive (in this example, the  "J:" drive) on your server. This makes it very easy to transfer files between servers as it appears as a local hard drive to copy/paste files to and from.