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Technology Solutions Centre

Faculty and Staff - Guide to Your Local and Network Drive Lettering

Most networked faculty and staff computers have been configured specifically for optimal performance within the University of Winnipeg's environment. What follows is a basic overview illustrating measures taken by T.S.C. to ensure the safety and error free operation of your PC and data. Please take a brief moment to read these points to take full advantage of your computer, the network and email system.

Drive Letters:

There are basically two types of drive letters. Drive letters associated to your local computer and drive letters associated to your network connections. Network driveletters are only available if you are logged onto the Novell network. Here's a run down of basic drive letters available to you.

Local Drive Letters:

  • C: This drive letter, associated with the PC's hard drive, contains your operating system and your applications.Do notsave personal, or important data on the C: drive. In the event your PC should become damaged or unstable, a restoration of your computer woulderase all dataon the C: drive leaving a clean operating system with your original, basic set of applications.
  • D: This drive letter, associated with the PC's hard drive, contains your 'DATA' partition. Your data partition is sizable and is usually not affected by a restoration performed by T.S.C. Therefore, aside from an unforeseeable hard drive failure, your D: DATA drive is a stable storage area for your personal and data files.Please note that you are responsible for the data on this drive and backing up files(either with the CD burner or saving to I: ) is highly recommended. Please note:Clients with older PC's may not have a D: Drive.

Network Drive Letters:

  • I: This drive letter, available to you when logged in to the network, isyourhome directory on the server and is not shared. The I: drive is regularly backed up and is an excellent storage space forhigh prioritydata and personal files. In the event of a complete hard drive failure on your PC, information saved to your I: drive would still be available to you. Please save allcrucial data to your I: drive.
  • S: This drive letter, available to you when logged into the network, contains your 'Share' directory on the server. This 'Share' directory is for temporary data storage only. Files in this directory are automatically removed every Sunday at 6 in the morning. Typical use for this directory is for sharing data too big for a floppy diskette. Please do not store confidential files in the Share directory. The Share directory is accessible to everyone.

This is an example of what your drive mappings look like using Windows 2000 Explorer.

User information:

Your network drive storage quota is limited and is a combined total of your home directory and share directory storage space.

Your local 'DATA' drive storage space: approx. 4 Gigabytes for UWin Dells, others may vary.