Mapping network drive in Windows XP and 7 – net use command Example

Mapping network drive in Windows XP or Windows 7 is much easier and
faster by using command line than by doing it on Windows explorer. If you have
been working in Windows environment with bunch of Windows
2000 or 2003 servers and your job requires frequent
access, copy or paste from local machine to those remote machine than mapping
them as network drive is the best option. You can use mapped network drive as any other folder which makes job of copy
paste very simple. Though windows provides multiple ways to map network
drive, I prefer to use command line i.e. "net use" command to
map my windows network drives. This works in Windows XP and should work in
Windows 7 without any fuss, its way faster than accessing every singlet node on
network to reach desired fast and In order to use this you just need to change
of network drive. In our last post on Windows operating system we have seen How
to find IP address from hostname and this article we will see how to map
remote host as network drive in windows XP. Any way enough talking, let's see
command to map network drive in windows:

Net use command to map network drive in
Windows XP and 7

Windows command to map network drive is "net use" and we
will use option * which automatically 
assign name of drive e.g. X drive, Y drive, Z drive. Now let's see an
example of mapping D:\ drive of remote host as windows mapped
drive in your desktop:

C:\Documents and Settings\supportUser>net
use * \\remoteHost.com\D$ * /u:domain\username

Type the password for \\remoteHost.com\D$:

Drive S: is now connected to \\remoteHost.com\D$.

The command completed successfully.

Now this network folder will be visible as S:\ drive in your My
computer as shown below:

Command
to show windows mapped network drive

Here is command to show all network drive which is mapped, we will use
same net use command without any option to see all drives as shown below:

C:\Documents and Settings\supportUser>net
use

New connections will be remembered.

Status      
Local     Remote                    Network

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

OK          
A:        \\hostname1\drive1       Microsoft Windows Network

OK          
I:        \\hostname1\drive1       Microsoft Windows Network

Disconnected N:        \\hostname3\drive3       Microsoft Windows Network

Unavailable 
Z:        \\hostname3\d$           Microsoft Windows Network

The command completed successfully.

Command
to disconnect mapped network drive in Windows XP and 7

You can use same command net use to even disconnect mapped network drive,
just pass /d argument to net use command for disconnecting mapped network drive
as shown below :

C:\Documents and
Settings\supportuser>net use /d z:

z: was deleted successfully.

That’s all on windows command to map remote host as network drive in
windows XP. As I said using command line to map network drive is much
faster than using windows explorer, it prevents your computer from being hung
during mapping process. Since net use is one of basic command this trick should
also work on other version of Windows operating system e.g. windows 7 or
Windows 8. Let me know if you find any other faster way of mapping drives in
Windows XP or Windows 7.

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Source:http://javarevisited.blogspot.com/2012/12/mapping-network-drive-in-windows-xp-command-net-use.html