Does Windows (XP or later) have a built-in way to create persitent drive mappings, like the ones SUBST creates? I found a 3rd party tool psubst. Is there a way to do it without 3rd party tools?
Solution:
Well Wikipedia mentions:
C:>SUBST /?Associates a path with a drive letter.SUBST [drive1: [drive2:]path]SUBST drive1: /D drive1: Specifies a virtual drive to which you want to assign a path. [drive2:]path Specifies a physical drive and path you want to assign to a virtual drive. /D Deletes a substituted (virtual) drive.Type SUBST with no parameters to display a list of current virtual drives.
So you can associate paths with drive letters using subst. The Persistent SUBST command (psubst) software seems to be darn handy, and they provide a solution to run it from startup:
https://code.google.com/p/psubst/#Inconstancy
Inconstancy
However restart of a system destroys a virtual disk. What to do? A disk can be created after startup. But what to do, when a disk is needed on early steps of a startup? For example, to run services? There is system feature to start a virtual disk from the system registry:
REGEDIT4 [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESYSTEMCurrentControlSetControlSession ManagerDOS Devices] "Z:"="\??\C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Shared Documents"
It is enough to create a text file with the extension
.REGand run it. When the next starting up of a system, the virtual disk will be exist at logon. It needs to define a name of disk and path. Note that each backslash in the path is doubled.
In Windows, you can run the registry editor as follows:
- Start » Run… (or hit Win+R)
- Type:
regedit - In Windows Vista and above, UAC will pop up, click “Yes”.