command linenetwork-shareswindows
Is it possible to browse a network for shares from the Windows command prompt?
I want to map a drive to a network share (pushd), but I can't remember the exact name of the machine or share. Is there a way to browse the network to find the shares via the command prompt?
Background: my Windows install was corrupted after an update and nothing's working now. I haven't backed up in a month, and I'm trying to do one final backup before I wipe it clean.
In short, no. There's no supported way to copy the current set of mapped/authenticated network resources from a non-elevated context to your elevated context. For all intents and purposes, they're separate logins that you just happen to be able to interact with from the same console. Being able to communicate between elevated and non-elevated processes would kind of break the whole security purpose of keeping them separated.
However, if these network drives are mounted using the credentials of your user account (and not a separate login/password), you could try just accessing them with the UNC path instead of an actual drive mapping.
(Possibly partial answer here.) This isn't possible from any version of Windows (including XP) to other Microsoft-based servers. I suspect this may be the case for other OSes hosting SMB shares as well, but I don't have a way to confirm that.
From a machine running Windows XP Professional 32-bit, I attempted to map a drive to a machine running Windows Server 2008 R2 named FSDC-SERVER27. I was logged on to the XP machine with an account that has Administrative rights on both the local and remote computers. As shown here I was unable to map a drive to the so-called "root" of the server:
But this is not unexpected. Mapped drives in Windows have always terminated at a share.
Consider this: If it were possible to map a drive to the root of a server, there would be settings exposed to configure permissions for the "root" share. No such settings exist (at least in Windows). Indeed, all settings for controlling access to and the behavior of shares exist on the share definition itself.
Therefore I conclude it's not possible to map a drive in Windows to the "root" of a server.
On Windows machines, the closest one gets to mapping to the "root" of a server is to map to the root of a specific volume. For example, on non-home editions of Windows, the automatically-generated shares known as Administrative shares include shares of the root of all fixed disk volumes (e.g. C$, E$, etc.). It's also possible on all versions of Windows to manually create a share of the root of a specific volume.
Best Answer
Try
net viewto get a list of computers. If you have a computer's name, try
net view \\computerto get a list of shares.(source)
Once you know what share you're after, you want to go with net use. Map a drive with
net use x: \\computer\share(replace X: with the drive letter you want to assign).
(source)