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Mount network drive shared folder in DOSBOX

Newer versions allow you to mount a shared folder from the network straightforward using the below syntax.
mount P //server/P-share/
* Note the trailing slash, it’s required!

Some (older) versions of DOSBOX do not allow you to mount (a drive letter connecting to) a network share, but you can circumvent this by using a soft symlink.

Let’s say we have a network drive with the letter P: that we want to mount inside DOSBOX.
We create a folder DOSPROGS on the C: drive to hold the symlink (and perhaps put the DOSBOX executable inside as well).

We then create the soft directory symlink by running the following command in a CMD prompt.
Note that I prefer to use the UNC path, because I think it’s more reliable than a drive letter to a share (that might be disconnected), but you can use both.
mklink /D C:\DOSPROGS\P-DRIVE \\server\P-share
mklink /D C:\DOSPROGS\P-DRIVE P:\

In DOSBOX we can now mount it using the symlink.
MOUNT P C:\DOSPROGS\P-DRIVE

2 replies on “Mount network drive shared folder in DOSBOX”

I was told a few years ago on Vogons that you can’t (or shouldn’t) use Dosbox in a shared environment because of they way it caches the drives. Dosbox never actually writes directly to the hard drive, nor does it read directly from the hard drive. In stead it loads the drive image in memory and does reads & writes there. When you exit Dosbox, it writes everything regardless of if any other share had modified the files. If all you are doing is playing a DOS game, you’re fine, but if you’re running any type of server program, or access files on a shared drive, you run the risk of corrupting your files. It’s too bad, too, because dosbox is the best DOS emulator there ever was and would be awesome for running DOS BBSes and DOS MUDS.

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