map external drive and remap internal drive or substitute a folder

I have a SSD for C: and internal Drive D:

I would like to create 2 batch files that I start manually.

How to:
1. If I connect my external drive I want the internal drive become E: and the external should be D:

On another PC:
2. Let's say I have a folder C:\folder1\folder2.
If I connect my external drive I want it to be mapped to C:\folder1. So if I have the ext. drive connected its root directory shows up instead of folder2.

spunk said:

You cannot Map an external drive to a folder on C:

Yes, you can. But the folder you want to map it to on C: drive must be empty first. I only know how to do it in disk management. I don't know how to do it in command prompt or powershell. You can even have the external drive have a drive letter AND be mounted to a folder on C: drive at the same time!

You can script a simple set of diskpart commands to accomplish this but I too am a little confused by some of the details in your post so I'll talk in general terms.

In diskpart, to assign a drive to a disk you select the disk and then perform a "assign letter=<letter>". To assign a mount point it is "assign mount=<path>".

There's even a simple trick to avoid creating a seperate text file for diskpart from which it would read the parameters.

I'll post some details in a few minutes, but in the meantime, if you could clarify the original post it would be appreciated.

From a batch file, you can run diskpart commands like this:

Place the following in the batch file:

Code:

diskpart /s diskpart.txt

The result is that diskpart will be called and run the commands contained in the text file called "diskpart.txt".

In the diskpart.txt file simply place commands like this:

Code:

select disk 2
assign letter=e
select disk 3
assign mount=c:\MountPoints\Vol1
exit

A trick to avoid the need for any external text file:

Place all your diskpart commands between parenthesis with echo commands and pipe the output to diskpart on the last line as in this example:

Code:

(echo select disk 2
echo assign letter=e
echo select disk 3
echo assign mount=c:\MountPoints\Vol1
echo exit
) | diskpart > nul

Naturally, you can use replaceable parameters in your batch file and add all kinds of logic to determine the correct disk ID, etc.

You can't assign letters and mount points to disks. You can only assign them to partitions.

Thanks for the catch. I was rushing and didn't think that through completely.

THX to all of you !!! (C: is my disk 0 and has the w10 partition on it)

hsehestedt said:

.........

Code:

select disk 1
assign letter=e
select disk 2
assign letter=d
select volume 1
assign mount=c:\MountPoints\Vol1
exit

Add Info: My external drive (E:) only has one partition named "ext_data"

I played around with diskpart, but did not find a solution for:

a) How can I be sure to mount exactly the partition named "ext_data" (without using the GUID like in mountvolume)

b) How can I autostart the script as soon as my external drive is connected or disconnected

To make sure you select the correct volume you can do a "list vol" in diskpart. You can have your batch file parse that to get the correct volume ID for the volume with the label "ext_data".

As for starting it automatically, I'm just guessing here, but you could probably set a condition in task scheduler to trigger the running of a batch file when a disk is connected / disconnected from the system but that would need further research.

THX, I will check the idea with the scheduler

Can you please give me help regarding the parsing ... I am a newby on those things ;-)