Mounting a remote CIFS/SMB share as a folder on a local disk (not a drive letter) on Windows

If you, like me, don’t like seeing a lot of drive letters of mapped network shares in Windows Explorer, you can also mount them inside a folder on your local file system.

Here is how you do it:

1. Mount the network share without specifying the drive letter
2. Create a folder where you want to mount the network share (this is optional)
3. Make a directory symbolic link to the newly mapped network share

net use \\server\share
mkdir c:\mount
mklink /d c:\mount\share \\server\share

Now, you can navigate to C:\mount\share and see the contents of \\server\share.

You’ll need to provide the network share credentials – net use will ask if you are not logged into a a domain account that has access.

This is not permanent, so if you need all the time, create a script:

net use \\server\share /USER:username password
mklink /d c:\share \\server\share