Mount network drive as physical drive

As I said on this (almost) identical question:

Are you sure this is really what you
want to do? There’s a very good
article on why this is a bad
bad bad
idea over at Joel on
Software (see point #3)…

The concluding statement is:

Conclusion: the next time someone
tries to sell you a programming
product that lets you access network
resources the same was as you access
local resources, run full speed in the
opposite direction.

If you want to know why, read the
relevant parts of the article.

And the short answer to your question is: No. Not easilly, and the reason is that a local disk is expected to have all sorts of functionality that a network share does not. A local disk expects a local file system (NTFS/FAT/etc), which a network share does not have (Well, it does, but at the server it’s hosted on, not your location), as well as a whole host of other features that just can’t be safely or reliably replicated (see the linked artical).

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