How to Rename Mapped Drives

Renaming drive mappings can be done in several ways, but automating the process is most efficient using a script.

Occasionally, an administrator might need to change drive-mapping names to hide share paths or to make the drive name user-friendly. This is an easy operation when done manually through a console, but when you try to automate this task, it becomes a little more difficult. Because mapped drives are not partitions on the local hard disk, common DOS commands, such as label, can't be used. Most drive-mapping commands, such as net use, don't have a way to customize the name of the mapped drive either.

One common way to perform this task is to hack the following Registry key and add the _LabelFromReg string value:

HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\MountPoints2\%key%

Here, the %key% variable is the drive letter to be changed.

There is a whole host of ways to make this method work, either by editing the Registry directly, via script, or by importing a .reg file using regedit /c. All of these methods require many steps and some require external files, so they might not fit into every administrative scheme. But there's an easier approach.

The Code

As it turns out, our old friend VBScript can be used to make this task a little more seamless. This simple script can be used on mapped drives as well as local partitions:

mDrive = "drive letter"

Set oShell = CreateObject("Shell.Application")

oShell.NameSpace(mDrive).Self.Name = "AnyName"
 

Running the Hack

To use this hack, simply edit the script to change the drive letter and drive name as desired. For example, if E: is a mapped drive that has the label Budgets on 172.16.33.14, and you want to change the label on the mapped drive to simply Budgets, change this line:

mDrive = "drive letter"

to this:

mDrive = "e:\"

Then, change this line:

oShell.NameSpace(mDrive).Self.Name = "AnyName"

to this:

oShell.NameSpace(mDrive).Self.Name = "Budgets"

Finally, run the script by creating a shortcut to it and double-clicking on the shortcut, by calling it from a logon script, or by any other method suitable for your environment.