permanently mapping a PC drive on a macbook

On a PC only Windows wifi network it's possible to map a harddrive on one pc to show up persistently on another PC. Is it possible to do something similar and permanently map (connect/link not sure of mac terminology) a Windows PC drive to an OS 10.4 mac book?

The scenario is that on my main PC box I have several harddrives one of which contains all my media (photos/music/films/work etc) I have a second PC which has a permanent link to that drive which tries to connect to it every time it boots up thus saving me the hassle of browsing through networks etc to find it each time.

I'll shortly be receiving a shiny new mac book and was wondering if there is any way to set up something similar? It's no big deal if there isn't but it would be nice if there was! It would save me splashing out more money on a NAS drive.

 

Hmm... while I'm sure this should be possible through some kind of automount or crontab in the terminal, I don't think there's any "easy" (read: gui) way of doing it. The "connect to server" command is quite easy to just refresh, but there is no option for doing it automatically that I can recall.

 

I had at one point found some software (don't think it was free) that was setup to do the automount.
There was a way I set automount in terminal, as Starlight mentioned, but I don't remember.
I would google it... I assume you will be sharing through Samba? There should be PLENTY of pages out there with info on this.

 

You should be able to do this, though I've only mapped network drives, nothing wireless. Here is a guide for the former: Networking Windows with Mac OS X.

To make the process more automated all you really need to do is make an alias of a folder within the mapped drive (hold Option + Open-Apple and drag the folder to your desktop or elsewhere). Then the next time you reboot the mac, simply click the alias, type your username & password and you will be connected again. You also have the option to store this information in the Keychain. And I suppose you could use the Automator to make the procedure even more automated.

 

Thanks heaps for that tip its just what I have been looking for.
a

 

thanks for all the info chaps... I'll give it a try on my old g3 ibook, see if I can get it working then it should be straight forward when my new macbook arrives.

cheers!
S