switching - is there an equiv to mapping drives?

[AnselTk1]

Hi All - wondering if some kind soul out there could give me some advice.

I am in the process of switching over to Mac as a long time PC user. Yada yada.

My question is on my PC (on all the PCs I use actually) I have an external drive that contains all my work and my entire photo and mp3 library. Windows would mount this drive and I would assign a drive letter to it (J).

I would share this drive on my network and when mapping it on my laptop or another PC, I could also map it as drive J.

This worked great because if I loaded itunes on any pc, it would always find my music because whether the external drive was physically connected or just mapped, the files would always be in the same location, like J:\music.

This also was great for proggies like InDesign, which would link files and no matter what the configuration, the file would always 'be' in the same drive location.

So, the big question is how to achieve this setup on my Mac? I can physically connect the drive to my PC, share it as J and then connect to the PC as a server on my Mac and mount the drive J and then add the folder to my itunes - however the songs will not be available when I disconnect the drive from the network and physically connect the drive to my mac because it will mount the drive as a volume.

Any help would be GREATLY appreciated.

 

[robbieduncan]

The only OS in the world that uses the short sighted (what if you have more than 26 drives/CD/USB sticks?) letter system. In OSX all mounted drives appear in the /Volumes folder. So if you have a drive shared as "MyTunes" it will mount at /Volumes/MyTunes.

 

[AnselTk1]

Thanks?

Hi - anyone else out there that can give me a little more help than the previous response?

Thanks

 

[robbieduncan]

I fail to see what you need help with. You have a partition (it may be the only one) on a drive that you've called J. When you connect the disk directly that will mount to /Volumes/J. When you network share it as an SMB share called J then the will also mount to /Volumes/J.

Of course if you've not called the parition/drive J then it's not going to work for you.

 

[AnselTk1]

thank you for clarifying.