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In windows drive management, when you create a new volume you have the choice of mounting that new volume to a drive letter, or you can mount it to a folder. So if you mount it to c:\Foo, then whenever you go to c:\Foo you will be actually accessing the new volume you just created.

My question is what are the consequences of assigning a volume to a folder, if any? Will it work fine just like a traditional drive letter? Are there any "gotchas" that I should know about? alt text

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That's news to me. Apparently real mount points have been around for a while in NTFS, here's a Microsoft Blog from 2005 which mentions - ironically - the "easy old days" when every partition had a drive letter: blogs.msdn.com/b/adioltean/archive/2005/04/16/408947.aspx – msw Jun 24 '10 at 21:22
@msw that's actually a really helpful link you gave me, it almost answers everything I wanted to know about it. Thanks! – 7wp Jun 24 '10 at 22:10
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I guess that it might influence some functionality rarely used on Windows: making hard links (you probably cannot have a hard link spanning between different file systems), moving a file will be slower... these things might be assumed to work inside a single drive letter by software.

But... I am only guessing, I don't have much experience with Windows. These are typical problems on POSIX platforms, but software there is usually written not to assume too much.

I'd be happy to see confirmation from someone more knowledgeable.

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