How to see what network drives a remote computer is connected to using powershell

Brandon LeeApril 25, 2013Last Updated: March 12, 2024

1 minute read

In our Powershell series for performing day to day administrative tasks we want to move on to a task that many admins may need to perform as an information gathering tool in troubleshooting, etc. That task is finding what network drives a remote computer is connected to. It is so not cool to have to remote into a computer and then open up “Computer” to see which network drives they are connected to. Despite being cumbersome and time consuming, it is just not very efficient.

As most admins already know, Powershell is the way of the future with Microsoft scripting. So, how can we gather this information by utilizing Powershell? Well, by using a Powershell to empower WMI to gather the information, we can quickly and easily get the listing of network drives that the remote computer has mapped.

Get Remote Mapped Drives

get-wmiobject win32_mappedlogicaldisk -computername %computername%

Simply run the command above from a Powershell command window, replacing the %computername% variable with the name of the computer you are wishing to gather the information for. Incidently, the get-wmiobject commandlet is extremely powerful and has a myriad of other commands that we can leverage to gather information from Windows hosts on our networks. We will be using this commandlet more in future posts to show you other very useful scriptlets that can empower you with all kinds of useful information.

Take a look at the SYNTAX for the get-wmiobject command:

Get-WmiObject [-Class] <String> [[-Property] <String[]>] [-Amended [<SwitchParameter>]] [-AsJob
[<SwitchParameter>]] [-Authentication <AuthenticationLevel>] [-Authority <String>] [-ComputerName <String[]>] [-Credential <PSCredential>] [-DirectRead [<SwitchParameter>]] [-EnableAllPrivileges [<SwitchParameter>]] [-Filter
<String>] [-Impersonation <ImpersonationLevel>] [-Locale <String>] [-Namespace <String>] [-ThrottleLimit <Int32>] [<CommonParameters>]

Final Thoughts

The very useful output that the command gives you is the drive letter as well as the servername and sharename that the remote workstation is connected to.