After all these years, users still love their drive letters. And inevitably, I still hear the complaint, “My X: drive has disappeared!” Which makes me wonder a few things.
- What does the X: drive point to?
- Why are we still using drive letters?
It’s not my place to change the world, but we can make it easier on ourselves and our users. So when you have a user who uses network shares mapped to drive letters, create a shortcut on their desktop, and use the following command line in the shortcut — just specify your desired drive letter and your server and share information.
cmd /c "net use x: \\servername\sharename /persistent:yes | explorer x:"
This will both re-map the drive letter if it isn’t mapped, and open a Windows Explorer window to the drive letter. You now put the power in the hands of the user, and free up your time to write blog posts about how you put the power in the hands of the user.