How do you map a virtual drive letter to a local path on Windows?

Question

All in the title. I'm looking for how to reference a local, not network, path, as a virtual drive letter. An innocuous example: C:\Storage as G:

Answer 1

I recently researched this subject and these are my findings.

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The subst command performs this function well, and its effect ends with the user session:

subst [drive1: [drive2:]Path]

vSubst by Thomas Bigler is a GUI for subst, it can also create a permanent association by running itself at startup (HKLM), just as subst could be configured to do.

For a permanent mapping this may not be preferable as anything loaded prior won't be able to reference the mapping, for instance entries added beforehand alongside it in HKLM -> [...] -> Run, Windows services, etc.

psubst on Google Code is an excellent batch script with the interface of subst (which it uses internally) with an additional optional /p parameter for managing permanent mappings through the following key, which is loaded much earlier:

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

Answer 2

You can also map to your local drive as if it were a remote one with

net use G: \\localhost\c$\storage /persistent:yes

It does bind late in the login process though.