Accessing Windows Storage Volumes by GUID

Suppose you have a storage volume whose drive letter is variable, but you need a consistent means of addressing it. (Like a flash drive that has something you need to access from a batch file.) You could use the whole WMIC-forloop-findstr business to get the letter, but then you have environment variables that need to be cleaned up. Or maybe you just don't want to deal with that whole thing and would rather just access the drive by a unique intrinsic property of it.

You can get the drive's GUID by typing "mountvol" at a command prompt. At the end of its help spew, it tells you all the volumes that the system sees at the moment:

Right click in the window and choose Mark, highlight the whole GUID line (the \\?\Volume{...}\ thing), and hit Enter to copy it. This path can sort of be used as a directory, with the following major limitations:

• You can't cd to it (even with PowerShell)
• You can't mount it with net use
• You can't get to it with pushd
• Almost no application will open files on it

The only thing you can reliably do is dir it (adding a second backslash to the end if you want its root directory) and copy files from it. Copying to and from it, however, lets you do basically anything - just copy a file off, edit it however you want, and copy it back it.