Persistent Subst’s – With a quick reg-hack you can use to make persistent SUBST drives

Kent J. Chen's WebLog - How to make an old school SUBST virtual drive persistent

“If you have touched DOS before, you might still remember what this old school command subst is all about. It’s a command used for substituting local paths on physical and logical drives, known as virtual drives. For example, if you want to have a logical drive P: mapped to a local folder on your computer, say c:\temp, you can simply use the following command to make it.

subst p: c:\temp

It’s very useful when you test out the application that uses a network mapped drive so you can have a complete test environment right on your local machine.

…

If you want to make them like a permanent driver that doesn’t disappear, you can either

Create a new registry entry “string value” in the following key:

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

The name of the entry should be “X:” where X is the drive letter you want to make.

And the value of the entry should be the local path in the form of: \??\c:\path

…” [GD: Good Stuff Leached for future searchability. All props to Kent]

Having been around for a bit, subst triggers a number of memories [insert MS-DOS 3.x flash back sequence here]. And I’ve used it a few times in recent memory to work around some hard coded drive/path issues. But even then I did it via a batch file, not knowing about this capability. I love learning new stuff! :)

 

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Subst to the Windows Virtual PC Host<->VM folder sharing rescue