asked on

command-line "Changing a drive letter"

Under disk managment, you can change the drive letters for the partitions, or drives in your system.

Does anyone know how to do this at the command prompt?

I know I can assign drive letters like:
c:\> net use k: "\\myserver\hidShare$" /persistent:yes

But I'm looking for a command that will manipulate the drive letters already assigned by the Operating System. (or delete drive letters assinged to a particular partition - and (perhaps, but not necessary) mount it as a volume)

Thanks IA for any info.

Pete Long

Hi ramble,
SUBST

Substitute a drive letter for a network or local path.

syntax
SUBST drive_letter: path

SUBST

SUBST drive_letter: /D

key
SUBST with no parameters will display current SUBST drives

/D : Delete the drive_letter substitution.
Compared to mapping a drive with NET USE the SUBST command allows mapping to a subfolder of a drive share - for the storage of user profiles this reduces the number of shares you need to create on the server.

Bugs
Under NT 4 SUBST'ed drives cannot be disconnected using the Explorer GUI - this was fixed in Win 2K.

In Win 2k you will have problems creating, accessing and deleting drive mappings with SUBST.

However under Win 2K or XP the functionality of the NET USE command is improved so you can now do
NET USE g: \\server\share\folder1\folder2

If the network resource is unavailable (ie the server is down) SUBST will continually retry - unlike NET USE which will try to connect once and fail - depending on your application this may be a good or a bad thing - a subst drive that is not available will badly impact performance of most applications.

Notice that when SUBST is used against a local shared folder, it will create a RECYCLER for that drive. The RECYCLER is not removed when the drive substitution is removed, but can be deleted manually.

"A man should never be ashamed to own he has been in the wrong, which is saying in other words, that he is wiser today than he was yesterday" - Alexander Pope (thoughts on various subjects)

Related Commands:

NET USE - Map a drive letter to a network drive

Equivalent Linux BASH commands:

none - unix has mount points rather than silly drive letters

http://www.ss64.com/nt/subst.html

PeteL

ramble

ASKER

yes, actually, the command that I used in my example (net use) is better than subst for many situation.

I'm actually wanting to be able to change the letter on actual partitons, or disks. In the "Disk Manager", Notice the Disks have a Disk ID (such as disk0, disk1, disk2...etc). I am probably looking for something that would have to refer to the disk ID and/or partition ID information.

wtrmk74

you will have to invest in a partition manager !

this cannot be done within a DOS coomand...
LABEL - will change the drive label
DBLSPACE - can unmount and mount but cannot be ran while windows GUI is running.

Sorry,
wtrmk74

ramble

ASKER

This CAN be done. (albeit a 3rd party windows script utility, or a C or CPP program). Every command that one requests for windows to perform some kind of action is done by a system call. This forum is only one avenue I'm using to find out what that system call is...and how to use it.

I might need to post this question in a programming forum, instead of an OS forum...but I thought that an Admin out there may have ran across this.

But make no mistake, the solution exists!

ramble

ASKER

Ok, I found what I was looking for...or at least, it will do. Thanks anyway for the input offered!

http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/fileio/base/editing_drive_letter_assignments.asp

http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/fileio/base/assigning_a_drive_letter_to_a_volume.asp

ASKER CERTIFIED SOLUTION

Pete Long

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ramble

ASKER

Good Answer! :^)