How can I make Windows 11 not show a network drive as a drive letter in Windows Explorer, if the physical drive is not mounted on the remote host? I recently bought a 4TB USB external hard drive with its own power supply, and attached it to a small PC on my LAN running Debian Trixie. Unlike the other USB drives attached to that machine, it has a power button, and does not spin up when power is applied. I have set it up as a Samba share and fixed it to automount in Debian whenever it is woken up by a button press. It is automatically unmounted if switched off in the same way.
What I find a bit irritating is that the drive letter shows up as available in This PC in Windows Explorer when it is switched off on the server, but with the drive size and free space of the server’s system drive on which the mount point exists. I would much rather the drive was shown as offline. Is there something I am missing, either in Samba configuration, or Windows 11?
