Mapping a Group Drive on a Mac

Owned by Jennifer Allan
Last updated: Dec 14, 2022 by Greg Jennings

To connect to a group drive your computer will either need to be connected to a CSCS supported network (MINTS, BIOSCI or SLCU) or you will need to be connected to the CSCS (Fortinet) VPN for that network. You cannot access these group drives from the UIS VPN.

If you have a Mac and have access to a Group Drive you can use the following information to create a connection to the data.  To start, you will need the path of the group drive which consists of a server name/name of the group drive.  If you don't have this, contact our Service Desk or refer to our list of published group drives.

  • Open Finder
  • In the menu bar, click Go then Connect to Server
  • Type in the following address of the drive replacing the server name and group drive name as appropriate
smb://servername/groups$/groupdrivename
  • Enter your username and password when prompted (the domain is MINTS, BIOSCI or SLCU depending on your domain membership).  Please note that if you have to prefix your username with MINTS (or BIOSCI, or SLCU); you need to put a backwards slash between your domain, and your username.  Thus: MINTS\abc123, for example.
  • You should be connected to the drive and a volume icon will show up on your desktop (this will only be there until you restart the computer, so you need to do 1 more step)
  • If the icon does not appear on your desktop then go to Finder > Preferences, then tick Connected servers under Show these items on the desktop
  • To create an alias of the volume so that you can easily reconnect without repeating the steps, select the volume icon, go to the Finder menu bar and click File, then Make Alias