Accessing USB stick without drive letter - powershell

Question

I am using powershell 2.0 in windows 7.
I would like to copy a file from my USB stick to a directory on my main hard drive using cmd or powershell. However, I need this to function on any PC without any input of the USB's current drive letter. In case that didn't make sense, let me rephrase it. I need a powershell or cmd command/ batch script to copy a file from my USB stick to my hard drive without any input.
Ideal command would assign the variable mydrive to the drive letter and allow me to run something like this in cmd
copy myvar:/path/fileToCopy.txt/ C:/path/of/target/directory/
I would really appreciate if I could use just my USB sticks name ('DD') to copy like this:
copy DD:/path/fileToCopy.txt/ C:/path/of/target/directory/
I've done well over an hours worth of research trying to find a way to pull this off and can't. Any help is greatly appreciated. Especially if it is clear how to use it. I am very new to powershell and cmd commands and don't understand the syntax. So stuff like [put drive name here] to show me how to use it would be amazing and is where a lot of forums are missing out.

Answer 1

You can do this like below:
$destination = 'C:\path\of\target\directory'
$sourceFile = 'path\fileToCopy.txt' # the path to the file without drive letter
# get (an array of) USB disk drives currently connected to the pc
$wmiQuery1 = 'ASSOCIATORS OF {{Win32_DiskDrive.DeviceID="{0}"}} WHERE AssocClass = Win32_DiskDriveToDiskPartition'
$wmiQuery2 = 'ASSOCIATORS OF {{Win32_DiskPartition.DeviceID="{0}"}} WHERE AssocClass = Win32_LogicalDiskToPartition'
$usb = Get-WmiObject Win32_Diskdrive | Where-Object { $_.InterfaceType -eq 'USB' } |
ForEach-Object {
Get-WmiObject -Query ($wmiQuery1 -f $_.DeviceID.Replace('\','\\')) #'# double-up the backslash(es)
} |
ForEach-Object {
Get-WmiObject -Query ($wmiQuery2 -f $_.DeviceID)
}
# loop through these disk(s) and test if the file to copy is on it
$usb | ForEach-Object {
# join the DeviceID (like 'H:') with the file path you need to copy
$file = Join-Path -Path $_.DeviceID -ChildPath $sourceFile
if (Test-Path -Path $file -PathType Leaf) {
Copy-Item -Path $file -Destination $destination
break # exit the loop because you're done
}
}
Hope that helps
If you upgrade your version of PowerShell, you can replace the Get-WmiObject with Get-CimInstance for better performance. See this and that