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noinsight

Windows is not limited to accessing partitions through drive letters either, it's just the existing convention.

You can mount partitions under directories just like you can in Linux/Unix.

PowerShell has Add-PartitionAccessPath for this:

> mkdir C:\Disk

> Add-PartitionAccessPath -DiskNumber 1 -PartitionNumber 2 -AccessPath "C:\Disk"

> ls C:\Disk

It will persist through reboots too.

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I've used this a few times to put games on exchangeable media. Installers don't like it if you pick an SD card as an install target, but they don't care if C:\Games\Whatever is actually an NTFS mount point that goes unpopulated as soon as I disconnect the memory card. This trick has the downside of confusing installers that try to check free space, though.

For permanently mounted drives, I'd pick symbolic links over mount points because this lets you do file system maintenance and such much easier on a per-drive level. You can still keep everything under C:\ and treat it like a weird / on Unix, but it you need to defragment your backup hard drive you won't need to beat the partition manager into submission to make the defragment button show up for your mounted path.

I use this to put Steam games on a RAM drive to speed up load time.

Don't have to use PowerShell either, it's been available for ages through Disk Management. Right-click on a partition -> Change Drive Letter and Path -> Add -> Mount in following empty NCTS folder.

NTFS mount points can be very handy for engineering around software that doesn't allow you to customize paths. I can choose VM disks with different performance or replication policies and stitch them together like I would on a *nix OS. It's very handy and only in rare occasions have I had applications "notice" it and balk.

Symlinks also work on NTFS, though mount points have the advantage of not having a canonical path that might be unintentionally resolved and persisted.

Only for NTFS (both source and dest) though, no exFAT shared drives under a folder mount or what have you. I think the same is actually true of ReFS for some reason.

When you create/format the partition in the GUI tools it'll actually ask if you want to assign a drive letter or mount as a path as well.

I just tried mounting a exFAT partition at "C:\exFAT" and it worked just fine.

Other way around. Try mounting E: in your exfat drive.

That's because some filesystems like NTFS expose necessary metadata for integration and some don't. FAT and exFAT do not.

RAW partitions can be mounted at a mount point (or drive letter).

Used to be able to use these with SQL Server.... 2000.

Many programs (Steam did, last time I checked) will look up the parent disk's free space when you do that and might refuse to install if that space is too small (even if target dir have enough)

Indeed, and if you only have a single drive letter, that drive is always the active one, and so you can just write paths starting with the backslash: \Windows\System32 etc.

What, excuse me, the fuck? I never knew one could do this. Thanks!

It's even available in the regular UI, open "computer management" go to the disk section and many of the 'magic' things about drives in windows world are just UI toggles

Back when Windows 2000 was the new thing, I used to put "Program Files" on another disk with this. Starting programs became faster too, as things loaded both from the OS drive and the drive where the programs were installed.

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