0script to create and name network shares

When updat­ing or repla­cing a home PC I use Win­dows Deploy­ment Ser­vices (WDS) to rein­stall Win­dows. It means I only have to main­tain a single up-to-date source for all the little free apps I use (Fire­fox, 7zip, Kodi, etc) and makes a new setup much more pain­less. One of the few bugs that has irrit­ated me for ages is the net­work drive map that I cre­ate has always had to be renamed manually.

I think the prob­lem stems from the need for admin rights when renam­ing a drive. Whilst I can run the rename com­mand as an admin­is­trat­or this seems to fail as the share isn’t present for the admin account, only for the user account. What I would need to do is run the com­mand as the user and then elev­ate it. I don’t know of any script­ing way to do this, so the nor­mal rename com­mand seems a dead loss.

The good news is that there is a way to do the rename via the registry, and registry changes can eas­ily be made from the com­mand line. To map and rename a share requires just 2 commands

reg add HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\MountPoints2\##serv­er-name#share-name /v _LabelFromReg /t REG_SZ /f /d “Name to use for share”

net use y: \\serv­er-name\share-name /user:serv­er-name\user­name pass­word /persistent:yes

This can be put in a simple batch file and duplic­ate for each share you want to map. Viola — no more ugly names for net­work shares

Found this useful? Please do let us know by dropping a comment below. If you would like to subscribe please use the subscribe link on the menu at the top right. You can also share this with your friends by using the social links below. Cheers.