How to view all drives, Disk Management under Windows
The Disk Management object under Microsoft Management console can be used to Change Drive letter association, find unrecognized partitions or Mount a logical drive into a folder as in Linux.
If you want to prevent access to a drive, read 2nd tip in “Points to note” given after this post or read how to Prevent access to select drives using Registry.
“One of the key differences between Windows and Linux is the tree structure used in Linux for filesystem. In Linux everything is a hierarchical leaf or branch of the Root “\” directory. It was only recently that Linux started loading (mounting) drives other than the system drive automatically. (If you want to know more, here is an article which will explain the Linux file hierarchy). To implement the Linux style tree structure in windows is pretty easy and is explained here.”
Open Disk Management object by typing “diskmgmt.msc” in START » RUN box or in Command Prompt. Here you can see all the Primary (Blue) and Logical (Green) partitions available on your system.
You will be able to see the Linux partitions too. Select a drive and Right Click on it. Here you can see an option “Change drive Letter and Paths“. Under this option you can remove a drives letter change it or mount a volume into a folder.
Screen shot of my H and G drives mounted in a folder “C:\Drives”
Some points to note here are …
2. If you do not assign a drive letter or mount the drive to a folder on another drive it will not be accessible by any means in Windows.
3. You can’t add more than one drive letter to a drive.
4. To mount a volume the folder must be on a different partition.
Consider reading The post on Microsoft Management Console if you want to know more.
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