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I have a PC here that needs to connect to a network drive to receive data. Multiple users will log in with their own accounts to do research with the data from that same network drive. I want to know if there is a way that i could map the network drive one time so that everybody who logs in will see the drive and won't have to map it themselves. The PC is Windows 7 pro. thank you

Ƭᴇcʜιᴇ007
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Beatle
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    Are you on a domain that's under your control? You could use group policy to do what you're talking about. If not, why not just log into each account and map the drive? – Adam Nov 18 '14 at 22:17
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    Yes it is under a domain. I am the domain admin. I will look into that. I don't want to log into each account because I am too lazy. i don't like to work hard. – Beatle Nov 18 '14 at 22:22
  • [Using Group Policy Preferences to Map Drives Based on Group Membership](http://blogs.technet.com/b/askds/archive/2009/01/07/using-group-policy-preferences-to-map-drives-based-on-group-membership.aspx) – Ƭᴇcʜιᴇ007 Nov 18 '14 at 22:29

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You mentioned that the accounts are on the domain, and you are the domain admin, and so this article goes over what you're asking. It shows you multiple ways of determining which users should have access to the network drive, if you don't want to map it for all your users.

Basically you have to setup a security group in AD with the users for which you want to map the network drive. There are other ways to map network drives, such as running a script on startup, if you need more complex logic, but typically doing it by security group is the easiest way to do it.

Adam
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  • thanks a lot. I will look at that article. My main goal is to make it so that every user that logs into that specific computer ( which is a virtual machine) has the mapped drives already to go for them. Since it will be something that a lot of the scientists here will need access to. Yeah, someone else mentioned the script method as well. I will look into both. – Beatle Nov 18 '14 at 23:16
  • is there a way to do it without group policy and without a startup script? I'm the only "real" user on this system —it's my personal laptop and not a domain member—, but I've noticed that if I am working with files under the mapped drive letter, I can't use "run as administrator" (or at least I wasn't able to for a batch script) because the Administrator account does not recognize the drive letter. I was able to work around it temporarily by using "net use", but this overrode my currentuser's mapping and messed me up when I rebooted. – Twisted Code Oct 31 '22 at 23:12