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Christopher Galpin
Asked: 2009-05-02 11:13:09 +0800 CST

How do you map a virtual drive letter to a local path on Windows?

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All in the title. I'm looking for how to reference a local, not network, path, as a virtual drive letter. An innocuous example: C:\Storage as G:

windows

2 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    I recently researched this subject and these are my findings.

    The subst command performs this function well, and its effect ends with the user session:

    subst [drive1: [drive2:]Path]

    vSubst by Thomas Bigler is a GUI for subst, it can also create a permanent association by running itself at startup (HKLM), just as subst could be configured to do.

    For a permanent mapping this may not be preferable as anything loaded prior won't be able to reference the mapping, for instance entries added beforehand alongside it in HKLM -> [...] -> Run, Windows services, etc.

    psubst on Google Code is an excellent batch script with the interface of subst (which it uses internally) with an additional optional /p parameter for managing permanent mappings through the following key, which is loaded much earlier:

    HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\DOS Devices
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  2. You can also map to your local drive as if it were a remote one with 

    net use G: \\localhost\c$\storage /persistent:yes

    It does bind late in the login process though.

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