Sunday, November 29, 2009

Creating drives from Folders in XP.

This is more of a technical post rather than what you normall find on my blog...
This is a problem i faced in Delphi ( my previous employer) and now with my current one too i have the same problem. The problem is that because of maintenance issues i get only one drive "C:" in my office computer. This means i cannot organize my data into different drives. If there are some tool chains ( like the ones that exist in most companies) which need some things to be in certain drives then you are really gonna have a trouble.

How to solve this?
Thankfully, there is  command in windows called subst which can be used to make a folder look like a virtual drive. This means you can for example have folders like c:\e, c:\f c:\j etc and then write the following commands to make them appear like drives
subst e: c:\e
subst f: c:\f
etc.
Now the best part is most softwares can use these as if they were real drives. I have known only very few softwares which have a problem with this. One of them is Activestate products like (perl, python). You can put these commands in a batch file and put them in your startup folder so that they will map on every login. The easiest way to remove the drives is by using the command below
subst delete e:
Now aint that really cool ;-). I would be putting some computer related stuff on the blog hence forth since i see a lot of people struggling with these simple tasks.

Apparently the problem is solved in Win 7 using some concept of virtual drives. I need to check that out.
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