Mapping A Drive Letter

Normally the drive letters on your PC are predefined to specific components on your local PC. The floppy drive will be letters A: and/or B:. The hard disk drive(s) will be letter(s) C:, D:, E:, etc... and the CD-ROM will be another letter. Other drive letters are available to be assigned to other devices. These devices do not need to be local to the computer but can be services that are connected through an attached network.

When your data or resources are not available on your local computer but are available on a remote system it is convenient to define and connect to the remote system with the use of a PC drive letter. These drive letter definitions make the services easier to access and use. They are very simple to create and only need to be defined once for any drive letter to be used.

A drive letter can be mapped as follows:

  1. Open My Computer (Computer in Windows Vista and 7)
  2. Select TOOLS on the toolbar menu option
  3. Select "Map Network Drive"
  4. Select a vacant drive letter to use
  5. Enter the path to the remote service (usually a UNC path like \\Server_name_here.ad.ufl.edu\my_share)
  6. Check the "Reconnect at Logon" box
  7. Left click on the "OK" button

Mapping a file windows share on a MAC

  1. Click the Finder icon in the Dock.
  2. Choose Connect to Server from the Go menu.
  3. In the address field of the Connect to Server dialog, type the URL using this syntax:
    • Mac OS X 10.5 and above = smb://Server_Name_Here.ad.ufl.edu:139/Share_Name/
    • Mac OS X 10.4 and below = smb://Server_Name_Here.ad.ufl.edu/Share_Name/
  4. Click Connect.
  5. When prompted, enter UFAD\Gatorlink_Username in the Name box and your Gatorlink Password in the Password box.