How to make SUBST mapping persistent across reboots?
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_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\DOS Devices] "Z:"="\\??\\C:\\Documents and Settings\\All Users\\Shared Documents"
It is enough to create a text file with the extension
.REG
and 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".
Installing it at HKEY_CURRENT_USER
has the benefit of having different setups for each user. I prefer to stick the user space setup as long as a system service does not depend on the device.
REGEDIT4
[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run]
"F Drive"="subst F: D:\\mount\\db"
"G Drive"="subst G: D:\\mount\\log"
Source: http://networkadminkb.com/KB/a446/how-to-use-drive-letters-mount-points-the-same-disk-drive.aspx
There's an answer in the page you linked to. You don't need the third party tool, you can do it with a simple registry entry, as detailed on that page.
Create a text file named 'mapdrive.reg' with these contents:
REGEDIT4
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\DOS Devices]
"Z:"="\\??\\C:\\Documents and Settings\\All Users\\Shared Documents"
Then should just be able to double-click on it to set up, no 3rd party tools needed.