How to make SUBST mapping persistent across reboots?

Question

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?

Answer 1

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 yes you can do the same without the program, but the program seems to be darn handy, plus they provide a solution to run it from startup:

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.

Answer 2

Did you even read 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.

Answer 3

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 dose 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

Answer 4

Drop a batch file in your Startup folder that does all the SUBSTs that you want to do.

Answer 5

I found this because I was looking for an improvement over my startup subst scripts - they worked OK, but sometimes executed after folders crashed on startup because my drive wasn't yet mapped.

First, I edited the registry, but was unable to get it to work. However, I did come across this alternative, which although it doesn't use subst does answer for me the question, "How to make SUBST mapping persistent across reboots?" Don't use subst... (insert appropriate 'computerName' and 'pathName'):

net use u: "\\computerName\c$\pathName" /persistent:yes

I adapted this from Hank Arnold's suggestion at this discussion of mapping local drives. I had guessed that \\myComputerName\c might work, but I didn't know to apply the $.

Before you try the "net use" command, try to navigate to

\\computerName\c$

to make sure you have 'computerName' correct.

Answer 6

Actually, the PSUBST tool joins two different ways of creation of substituted drives in Windows. If you want to have persistent drives between startups then you can run this tool once per each drive that you need. Another way is to use the method suggested by "davr". the PSUBST tool just makes the same but allows to make it in the easier way.