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.
> Drives with a drive-letter other than A-Z do not appear in File Explorer, and cannot be navigated to in File Explorer.
Reminds me of the old-school ALT + 255 trick on Win9x machines where adding this "illegal trailing character" made the directory inaccessible from the regular file explorer.
This all sounds like a wonderful way to write some truly annoying malware. I expect to see hidden mounts on SQL-escape-type-maliciously-named drives soon...
Anybody who's had to look through files on multi-disc arrays knows exactly how weird the drive letters can get. Mount the ISOs of thirty six 8.5GB DVDs because someone thought it was a good idea to split zip a single archive into 7.99GB segments and things get very tricky in cmd. If you weren't in the habit of using several layers of quotation marks to separate everything you'll form it very quickly because the operators can be the same symbols as the drive letters, as shown in the article with the "+" example.
> In other words, since RtlDosPathNameToNtPathName_U converts C:\foo to \??\C:\foo, then an object named C: will behave like a drive letter. To give an example of what I mean by that: in an alternate universe, RtlDosPathNameToNtPathName_U could convert the path FOO:\bar to \??\FOO:\bar and then FOO: could behave like a drive letter.
For some reason I remember that the original xbox 360 had "drive letters" which were entire strings. Unfortunately I no longer have access to the developer docs and now I wonder if my mind completely made this up. I think it was something like "Game:\foo" and "Hdd0:\foo".
I remember vividly when a user couldn't access his smb drive from Windows because both his printer and also the computer's case came with one of these multi-cardreaders with n slots and the drive letters collided. That's when I learned that smb drive letters don't even come from the "global" pool of drive letters, because, and this is obvious in hindsight, they are a per-user affair (credentials and all that).
You can fix the drive letter assignments at any time if they become a problem, or use a directory as a mount point if that's less troublesome. (Win-R, diskmgmt.msc)
Not while it's mounted. This is akin to complaining that on Linux if you unplug a flash drive and plug in a different one that second drive could "steal" /mnt/sdb1 or whatever.
I remember when A and B were commonly used drive letters. C was a luxury. D was outright bourgeois.
But for some reason, drive letters starting with C feel completely natural, too. Maybe it's because C is also the first note in the most widely known musical scale. We can totally afford to waste two drive letters at the start, right?
It's just whatever happens to end up there? That's why D was typically the CD-ROM: A was the first floppy drive, B the (typically absent) second floppy drive, C the only hard disk, and then D was the next free letter.
On my laptop, D is the SD card slot. On my desktop, it's the 2nd SSD.
The cursedness of "€:\" is awesome. It's amazing how much more flexible the NT kernel is vs what's exposed to the user.
> Drives with a drive-letter other than A-Z do not appear in File Explorer, and cannot be navigated to in File Explorer.
Well there goes my plan to replace all my drive letters with emojis :(
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.
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.
From the article:
> Drives with a drive-letter other than A-Z do not appear in File Explorer, and cannot be navigated to in File Explorer.
Reminds me of the old-school ALT + 255 trick on Win9x machines where adding this "illegal trailing character" made the directory inaccessible from the regular file explorer.
Shhh… that’s how we hid the Duke Nukem installs on the boxen in the dorm computer lab.
Hmm. This seems like it could be abused rather hilariously (or not, depending on your perspective) by malware...
If the malware that exploits my machine also runs off the eggplant emoji drive, I'm becoming Amish.
This all sounds like a wonderful way to write some truly annoying malware. I expect to see hidden mounts on SQL-escape-type-maliciously-named drives soon...
Anybody who's had to look through files on multi-disc arrays knows exactly how weird the drive letters can get. Mount the ISOs of thirty six 8.5GB DVDs because someone thought it was a good idea to split zip a single archive into 7.99GB segments and things get very tricky in cmd. If you weren't in the habit of using several layers of quotation marks to separate everything you'll form it very quickly because the operators can be the same symbols as the drive letters, as shown in the article with the "+" example.
> In other words, since RtlDosPathNameToNtPathName_U converts C:\foo to \??\C:\foo, then an object named C: will behave like a drive letter. To give an example of what I mean by that: in an alternate universe, RtlDosPathNameToNtPathName_U could convert the path FOO:\bar to \??\FOO:\bar and then FOO: could behave like a drive letter.
For some reason I remember that the original xbox 360 had "drive letters" which were entire strings. Unfortunately I no longer have access to the developer docs and now I wonder if my mind completely made this up. I think it was something like "Game:\foo" and "Hdd0:\foo".
This was a cool article. Learned something new today.
Windows drive letters are ridiculous. Use an external drive for e.g. video editing, its letter can be stolen by another drive, you can’t work anymore.
I remember vividly when a user couldn't access his smb drive from Windows because both his printer and also the computer's case came with one of these multi-cardreaders with n slots and the drive letters collided. That's when I learned that smb drive letters don't even come from the "global" pool of drive letters, because, and this is obvious in hindsight, they are a per-user affair (credentials and all that).
I think the concept of drive letters is flawed.
You can fix the drive letter assignments at any time if they become a problem, or use a directory as a mount point if that's less troublesome. (Win-R, diskmgmt.msc)
Not while it's mounted. This is akin to complaining that on Linux if you unplug a flash drive and plug in a different one that second drive could "steal" /mnt/sdb1 or whatever.
I remember when A and B were commonly used drive letters. C was a luxury. D was outright bourgeois.
But for some reason, drive letters starting with C feel completely natural, too. Maybe it's because C is also the first note in the most widely known musical scale. We can totally afford to waste two drive letters at the start, right?
Oh bless you and your youngsterness. A and B, by convention, were reserved for floppy drives and C was typically the first hard drive.
Hard drives were a luxury.
D was typically a CD-ROM drive. So when CD-ROMs went the way of the dinosaurs, where did D go ? Is it always some kind of SYS drive nowadays ?
It's just whatever happens to end up there? That's why D was typically the CD-ROM: A was the first floppy drive, B the (typically absent) second floppy drive, C the only hard disk, and then D was the next free letter.
On my laptop, D is the SD card slot. On my desktop, it's the 2nd SSD.
D usually refers to the second internal storage device these days. Either a second SSD, a large HDD, or an extra partition in your system disk.