apocryph.org Notes to my future self

18Sep/060

Even Explorer doesn't get mount points right

I’ve been playing with mount points in Windows recently, whereby a directory can be mapped to the contents of a drive. I use this on prospertine to place g:\docs onto my small-ish 48GB RAID 1 array for safe keeping, while everything else on g: (downloads, VMs, etc) is stored on a single 320GB drive without redundancy.

I just ran into a potentially huge gotcha with mount points: Explorer doesn’t full grok them. From the article:

If you try to delete folders that are stored on a mounted drive and send them to the Recycle Bin, you may receive the following error message:

Cannot delete Foldername: Access is denied. The source file may be in use.

Status is also amusing:

Microsoft has confirmed that this is a problem in the Microsoft products that are listed at the beginning of this article.

So, if you use mount points, forget about the recycle bin. This is fine w/ me since I always SHIFT-DELETE stuff, but if you need the security blanket, well, it’s all drive letters for you.

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