Mapping Drives to Folders.

Introduction.

If you are fond of typing a folder path into the Windows Run, Open or Save As dialog boxes, you could find yourself entering something which is quite lengthy. If the path to a folder location is reasonably difficult to get to, and you use it regularly, it would be good if you could save yourself some time in order to save items there more quickly. A feature available in Leasey allows you to map folders to drive letters.

Your Windows computer already has specific drive letters assigned. Almost certainly one of these will be drive letter C, containing your operating system and program files. But you might have drive D which takes you to a secondary drive you may have installed. This means that if you want to save a file to a folder on the drive, you can type "D Colon Backslash Folder Name Backslash File Name". But if you want to save a file in a folder several sub-folders deep, such as "D Colon Backslash Dropbox Hartgen Consultancy Backslash Jim Jones Backslash Documents", it can take a while to type that into an appropriate Edit Field. Wouldn't it be better if we could assign a vacant drive letter to that folder or a similar one, so that all we have to do is type the drive letter colon backslash, then the document name?

How It Works.

Let us assume you have a folder on a drive called Leasey. We are going to assign drive letter L to it.

  1. Using File Explorer, browse to the folder you wish to assign to the drive letter. In our example, that is "Leasey". Don't press Enter to open up the folder.
  2. Press the Leasey Key then Windows+M.
  3. You are asked for the name you would like to assign to this mapped drive. This is for your reference only. It is only used in the event you wish to remove the newly mapped drive in the future so you are aware of which one you are removing. In this case, we will type the word "Leasey" and press Enter.
  4. You are now given the location of the folder to which the drive letter will be assigned. This is in an Edit Field, so you can change this if Leasey has detected an incorrect path. It must look something like "D Colon Backslash Leasey". It should not be "Backslash Backslash Leasey" as occurs with some network sources.
  5. If you are satisfied with the location, press Enter to move to the next screen.
  6. Finally, you are asked for a drive letter. Type it without a trailling colon character, such as, "L".
  7. Press Enter. If the drive has already been assigned, Leasey will advise you of this and you will need to repeat the process. Otherwise, you will be advised that the process is complete.
  8. The drive is instantly mapped. You can always try it by pressing Windows+R to move to the Windows Run dialog box, type "L Colon", and press Enter. You should now be in the folder you assigned to the drive letter.

Important Notes.

When the computer starts, the drive must immediately be accessible for the mapping to take place.

On some machines, JAWS may give some extraneous speech output for a second or two while the mapping of the drive takes place.

If you have assigned a Dropbox folder to a drive letter, and you wish to access items on the Context Menu, such as to copy a Dropbox link, you will find these are not available in such a situation. Should you wish to do this, you would need to browse to the Dropbox folder using the older method.

The convenience of mapping drives in this way however far outweigh these slight disadvantages.

Deleting a Mapped Drive.

Should you wish to remove one of the mapped drives from being used, from anywhere press the Leasey Key then Windows+D. to repeat, you do not need to be in File Explorer to do this.

You will be presented with a list of your mapped drive names. Use Down Arrow to find the one you wish to delete and press Enter.

You are asked if you are sure you wish to remove the mapped drive association? Press Enter, since the "Yes" Button is in focus. The association is then removed. Note that this does not in any way remove the original folder from your computer. All we are doing is removing the association between the drive letter previously assigned and the folder. Back to Help Index.