Overview
Mounting your home directories on a windows machine is fairly straightforward. However, both Windows 95 and Windows NT have different methods of doing so. A large part of this difference is due to a little quirk Windows 95 has. The Math Lab's Windows 95 machines auto-login as "grad", this becomes a problem when users try to access a network resource that requires a different user name, such as there home directory. Even if you are not in the Math Lab, the following steps may still be neccessary to mount a user-specific share.
Logging in Correctly
Before we attempt to mount a home folder we must make sure that we are logged into windows correctly. Whenever Windows boots and all of the networking components have been installed correctly Windows will prompt you to enter your network login information for Microsoft Networking. The user name entered here is especially important since it is automatically used when trying to mount or access a share. For example assume we enter "grad" as the user, and "grad" as the password, when we try to later access shares, it will only prompt us for a password, since it assumes that we are "grad".This becomes a problem when trying to access a share where the disired account is not "grad". Say for example on the mail server, we had a user account named "test123", which requires a password of "123test". In Windows 95 if we try and access that account it will only ask us for a password, we cannot change the user name Windows transmits from "grad" to "test123". A simple solution to this is to go to the Start button and Select Shutdown , then select Close all programs and log on as a different user .
After doing this, Windows will prompt you for a new user name, and password for Microsoft Networking. For the user name you will want to enter the user name that corrisponds to the account you wish to access. Following our example, we wish to access the account "test123", so we would enter "test123" as the user name. In the password field enter the proper password for the "test123" account, in our case we would enter "123test". At this point Windows should start up as normal.
Mapping the Share
Now that we have logged in with the correct user name we can mount our home directory as a share. To do this first find the Network Neighborhood icon, right click on it, then click on Map Network Drive .
Once you have done this, Windows will display a Map Network Drive dialog box, in which Drive and Path need to be defined. The Drive selection is asking you where you want your directory to be mounted. For instance, we have selected "F:", this means that our share will be mounted and accessible as the drive lettered f, (it will be accessible like an ordinary hard drive). For path you will want to enter the path of the server you wish to connect to. Because we want to connect to the Mail Math Server (where your home directories are stored) we enter the following: \\mailserv\homes\ , after doing this hit OK.
After hitting OK Windows will prompt you for a Network password, this password is the same as the account password you are trying to share. After supplying the correct password, and hitting OK your directory should be mounted as the drive letter you specified.
That's it, you should now be able to access your directory as if it were another drive on the system, in the location you specified. To verify the operation was successful double-click on My Computer , there should be another drive letter present that was not there before, double-clicking on it will open your home directory.