NTFS mount points via PowerShell

As I mentioned in an earlier post, it’s sometimes useful to mount an additional drive in a directory on an existing drive, Unix-style, rather than presenting it with its own traditional Windows-style drive letter.

Here’s how we do it in PowerShell:

If the volume is already mounted to a drive letter, we need to find the disk number and partition number of the letter:

Get-Partition | select DriveLetter, DiskNumber, PartitionNumber | ft

DriveLetter DiskNumber PartitionNumber
----------- ---------- ---------------
                     0               1
          C          0               2
                     1               1
          E          1               2
                     2               1
          F          2               2
                     3               1
          G          3               2

In this example, we see that volume G corresponds to DiskNumber 3, PartitionNumber 2.

Let’s say we want to mount that disk under E:\SharedFiles\Mountpoint. First we need to make sure the directory exists. Then we’ll run the following commands:

Add-PartitionAccessPath -DiskNumber 3 -PartitionNumber 2 -AccessPath 'E:\SharedFiles\Mountpoint\'
Remove-PartitionAccessPath -DiskNumber 3 -PartitionNumber 2 -AccessPath 'G:\'

Summary

As usual, PowerShell is kind of “wordy”, but we do get our things done.

Tags: howtoPowerShell