How to Map a fake drive letter to a folder in Vista/XP

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If you want to Map a fake drive letter to a folder you have use subst command.Use the SUBST command to substitute a drive letter for a path in order to treat a virtual drive (a reserved area rather than an actual disk drive) as a physical drive.
Syntax

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.

Subst Examples

1) To create a virtual drive F for the path, SALES\LETTERS (under the root directory) of drive C, enter

subst f: c:\sales\letters

Read and write requests to either drive F or to C:\SALES\LETTERS will be stored in the C:\SALES\LETTERS directory area.

2 ) subst N: C:\windows

now if you enter in N: you will see the Windows folder’s contents. This is done on a per-user basis (every user can have its N: pointing to a different directory) and it disappears on the first reboot.

Make it Permenent

If you want to have it permanent, there is a hidden trick, creating a new key in the registry.You have to go to

HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\DOS Devices

and there create a key named with the drive letter you want, colon included (f,N: in our example) and with this value:

\??\c:\\windows

you can obviously change c: and windows for whatever folder you want, but remember to double the backslash after the unit letter, because it won’t work with a single backslash.

Six DOS commands cannot be used with virtual drives created with the SUBST command. They are:

CHKDSK
DISKCOPY
FDISK
FORMAT
LABEL
SYS

Related content:

  1. Drive Manager – Get all the Information about different types of drives
  2. How to mount an External drive partition as directory in XP
  3. How to convert NTFS to FAT32 file system in XP
  4. How to Defrag Multiple Hard Drives At Once
  5. File Pathname character limitations in Windows

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Topics: Windows Vista, Windows XP

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I want to create fake user account or just user account folders on Windows XP without creating user accounts, is there any software that can do that? please reply me ASAP to my mail id. Thanks in advance.

-Hariharakumar

Comment by Hari on December 30, 2009 @ 2:43 pm

For Windows 7, the Registry Key is:
HKLM\SYSTEM\ControlSet002\Control\Session Manager\DOS Devices

Comment by Greenheart on February 16, 2011 @ 3:23 pm

Quote Greenheart START
“For Windows 7, the Registry Key is:
HKLM\SYSTEM\ControlSet002\Control\Session Manager\DOS Devices”
Quote Greenheart END

This is not correct.
In W7 the reg-key is always
HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\DOS Devices
But – your key works too. (not always)

QUOTE Admin START
“it won’t work with a single backslash”
QUOTE Admin END

Works also !with! a single backslash in Win7 – tested.

Comment by skavenger on November 24, 2011 @ 10:52 am

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