Mapped Drive as a local drive

Is there a way to map a network path as a physical disk, i.e. drive type being "local disk" or "removable disk" not "network drive"?  I've been looking for some virtual drive software that would allow me to do this, but all the programs I've found create a "network drive" when trying to mount a "remote" shared folder. Same thing happens when using the subst command.  The reason I'm needing to be able to do this, we have a windows 2000 system running an ultrasound machine and would like to backup and export all images directly to our data server.  Now we are having to backup to DVD’s.  I figured I would just put it on the network and map a network drive to our sever, which is what I did. The only problem is the program that is doing the image back-ups / exports will not recognize a "Network drive"  as a place to save files.  It dose recognize every other type of drive, i.e. removable drive (USB), local disk and dvd-r/cd-r drives.