Browsing directory without using mapped drive

Question

Is there an app or way to browse a directory that requires different login credentials without using a mapped drive?

The issue is given one login credential Windows Explorer only allows you to map it to one drive and disallows using the same login credential to map to a different drive.

Answer 1

That's simply not true...you can authenticate with the same login credentials to multiple servers. What you can't do is:

• Be automatically authenticated to the 2nd server
• Connect to the same server with different credentials

My understanding is that the reason for both problems is that Windows stores the credentials by server name.

Answer 2

As far as I know, you cant map a drive to a shared folder with one username/password on the same server as another mapped drive with a different username and password.

If you are doing it programmatically you can add multiple credentials to the credential cache, that would allow you to authorise yourself with multiple permission sets.

I've always been able to map drives using the same username and password to two different servers.

For example

net use x: \\server1\shareFolder /user:domain\username
net use y: \\server2\shareFolder /user:domain\username

You can omit the /user section if you want the network share to be mapped as the current user.

You can have as many network drives as you want on different machines as long as you have enough drive letters.

alternatively you can use the unc path \server1\share1 and \server2\share1, if your username and password which you are not currently logged in as do not have access windows will prompt you for a username and password.