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I have partitions set up on my windows 7 machine such that one drive holds all my personal documents, while the C drive is meant to hold everything else. To help the two work together, I made some symlinks in my personal folder (e.g. in my case C:\Users\Ken\Music is just a symlink to the real Music folder on the other partition).

This has worked for me so far, but there is one issue I have run into. Usually, the second partition is labeled as D:. But if I boot into windows with an external hard drive attached, it's the external drive that is named as D:, while the partition with my personal files is assigned F:. Naturally, this screws with the symlinks I have created.

So my question is this: Is there a way to create a symlink such that the drive letter doesn't matter (maybe via a UUID or something)? If not, is there I way I can guarantee that a given partition will always be assign the same drive letter?

Note: In case it helps, my personal partition and system partition are both on the same internal hard drive. The external hard drive has nothing to do with this setup, other than the fact that things get screwy when it's present at boot-time.

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  • These letters that are assigned to the partitions, shouldnt be changing in a NT type of system? get into the disk manager and reassign the letters? when that doesnt work, change the ID of one of the drives so it knows which is which. I donno, but if the system cant figure out which is which, how could the solution? NOTES: Changing the ID can cause its own problems. Same IDs occur from cloning (usually). Different IDs for the Boot drives the system can think things changed , which causes other problems, as bad as loosing boot.
    – Psycogeek
    Commented Jan 21, 2012 at 10:24

2 Answers 2

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Instead of using symlinks, could you mount the separate partition as a path, rather than a drive letter?

It would depend on how you have your partitions and data organised, but mounting as a path should fix the problem of drive letter reassignment.

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  • Huh, I didn't know we could do that in NTFS!
    – Ken Wayne VanderLinde
    Commented Jan 21, 2012 at 21:07
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Using Mount as suggested works, except that the mount shows the HOST drive space in explorer, even when accessing through the network. Who would want to see C: drive space when looking at c:\mount?

Another method is to mount your partitions further down the drive list, M,N.O.

Once you set a drive to a letter in disk management, it should keep that letter, as long as you connect it to the same port. So you can manually reserve say G,H,I,J for your USB sticks and such.

Very inconvenient. This demonstrates M$ limitations (or disinterest) in providing a overall intelligent operating system.

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