Mounting your SSH shares in Microsoft Windows
Ever wanted to be able to access your SSH shares on your Microsoft Windows workstation? So far I have used WinSCP for this purpose, but this solution is far from ideal. You quickly become impatient with copying files back and forth endlessly, as the build in editor is rather “low-tech”.
Red Drive is a freeware file system that allows you to mount your SSH shares as a drive accessible from within Microsoft Windows. This means you can mount your SSH shares as a network drive and save, or open, files from within any application on you Microsoft Windows workstation.
Red drive is avaliable for download here (direct link).
Installation
Installing Red drive is easy. Simply download the zipped binary and run install.msi. After the installation is complete, you will have a Red Drive listed under My Computer along with all the usual stuff.
Mounting
To mount a SSH share right click on the Red Drive icon, and choose new connection. Then select SFTP (FTP via SSH) from the drop down menu and enter the connection details below. Once you completed the connection details, press OK.
At this point, I get a strange error courtesy of our friend William Gates: “Recovery policy configured for this system contains invalid recovery certificate.” (A possible solution can be found here.)
However, you can bypass the error by simply clicking OK in the Red Drive Error window, and then Cancel in the Connection window.
Finally, refresh Explorer by pressing F5, and viola: your drive appears. Repeat the process to add more SSH shares.
Customizing Red Drive
Disclaimer: Be carefull not to violate the license agreement
“You acknowledge that the Software is a confidential trade secret of JSCAPE and therefore you agree not to reverse engineer, de-compile, or disassemble the Software.“
To customize Red Drive go to the installation directory (~C:\Program Files\Jscape\Red Drive).
Updating icons
In the Icon/ directory you find the icons associated with Red Drive. You can replace them with something a bit more snazzy by creating some custom icons in Inkscape or by downloading some from eg. iconarchive.com.
Customizing system tray name
In the file RedDrive.Tray.exe.config, you can alter the text displayed when you hover over the Red Drive icon in the system tray by editing Red Drive in the code below to something of your liking.
<setting name=”TrayText” serializeAs=”String”>
<value>Red Drive</value>
</setting>
Alternatives
Alternatives to Red Drive includes SFTPdrive (Digged, 2006), which is avaliable in a six week free trial version.
Great – this makes Windows a little less anoying or much more secyure to work with. Thanks for the link.
I just made my list of favorite Windows programs:
http://www.tjansson.dk/?page_id=86
Thanks, I searched for a Windows alternative to sshfs, and this came up. Great! Thanks for letting the rest of us know.
Simply outstanding ^_^! I like posts like that. Your blog is added to my favorites
. Continue writing.
Thank you for this article!
I was searching quite a lot for something like sshfs for Windows!
Great program and idea until you realize that you need .NET framework 2.0
Your blog is interesting!
Keep up the good work!
This would work great, except I get a “There was an error genearating the XML document.” error. anybody know what that means?
Loved it,
Only if there’s a way to use svn with red drive things would be so much better,
It helped me a lot !!
I had been struggling every time to sftp files back and forth to modify it, now it is a breeze
Thanks to your blog and Red Drive
it’s no longer being developed and installation aborted with error on my vista 64. a pity!
at least they should release the sources and make red drive an open source project.
anyclient is NOT an alternative to red drive as anyclient is just a client and doesn’t let you mount ssh drives.
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Anyone having this work in windows 7 64bit? I have it working fine within xp running within virtualbox, but i really need to get it working within windows 7.
If i run it with as a regular user and try to open a site from the tray icon, it gives me an error about it not being associated with any program.
If i run it as an admin with or with xp compatibility on, the explorer window pops up, but no additional links for red drive connections, etc.
It works perfectly!
I found a bug of Red Drive.
Sometimes files are saved to “C:\Document and Settings\(user)\Application Data\Red Drive\(sftp server)\” which should be cache(?) or index(?) location; and the files will not appear at “Red Drive” or the sftp server.
e.g.
- whenever I want to save a file, the default location is at “C:\doc & …”, I have to change the location to “Red Drive/…” manually everytime
- When I open a new MS Office 2007, and save it to “Red Drive/…”; the file is in fact saved in “C:\doc & …” and it is NOT in “Red Drive/…” nor the sftp server!
Anyone experienced the same problem?
Thank you for reading!
Hm, nice but if i would like to do scp and not have sftp? Also… how about using pageant for authentication using a key? these two things would be great!