Ycan assign one or more drive paths to a primary partition, a logical drive, or a simple volume on a dynamic disk. Assigning a drive path creates a mounted volume, which appears as a folder within an NTFS- formatted drive that has a letter assigned to it. Besides allowing you to sidestep the limitation of 26 drive letters, mounted volumes offer these two advantages:
You can extend storage space on an existing drive that’s running low on free space. For instance, if your digital music collection has outgrown your drive C, you can create a More Music folder in C:\My Music. Assign a drive path from a new partition to the More Music folder and you’ve increased the effective storage by the size of the new volume.
Make commonly used files available in multiple locations. Say you have an enormous collection of clip art that you store on drive X, and each user hasa folder in his or her My Documents folder where they store desktop publishing files. In each of those personal folders, you can create a subfolder called Clipart and assign a drive path to the X partition. That way, the entire clip-art collection is always available from any user’s desktop publishing folder, without requiring them to manage shortcuts or worry about changing drive letters.
To create a mounted drive, follow these steps:
From the Disk Management utility, right-click the volume you want to change (in either the volume list at the top of the window or the graphical view at the bottom), and choose Change Drive Letter And Paths.
Click Add to open the Add Drive Letter Or Path dialog box.
Select Mount In This NTFS Folder (this is the only option available if the volume already has an assigned drive letter).
Click the Browse button. The Browse For Drive Path dialog box that appears shows only NTFS volumes, and the OK button is enabled only if you select an empty folder. Browse to the location where you want to create the drive path and then select an empty folder, or click New Folder to create one.
Click OK to add the selected location in the Add Drive Letter Or Path dialog box and then click OK to create the drive path.
You can manage files and subfolders in a mounted volume just as if it were a regular folder. If a volume is mounted to a folder located in the root of a drive, it appears in Windows Explorer as a drive icon. However, if the volume is mounted to a subfolder in any other location, the mounted volume appears in Windows Explorer as a folder icon, indistinguishable from a regular file folder. In that case, the only way to tell that this folder is different from other folders is to right-click the folder icon, choose Properties, and then inspect the General tab. The Type field appears as Mounted Volume, and the Target field identifies the label of the volume that actually contains the files.
If you use the Dir command in a Command Prompt window to display a folder directory, a mounted volume is identified as <JUNCTION> (for junction point, another name for mounted volume), whereas ordinary folders are identified as <DIR> (for directory, the MS-DOS term for a folder).
caution
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When creating mounted volumes, avoid creating loops in the structure of a drive—for example, by creating a drive path from drive X that points to a folder on drive D and then creating a drive path on drive D that points to a folder on drive X. Windows allows you do this, but it’s invariably a bad idea, because an application that opens subfolders (such as a search) can go into an endless loop.
To see a list of all the mounted drives on your system, open the Disk Management utility and choose View, Drive Paths. Note that you can remove drive paths from this dialog box; if you do so, the folder remains in the same spot where it was previously located, but it reverts to being a regular, empty folder.
also you can make a d:\programs and place a shortcut on c:\
that might also map all progs to d:\programs
good luck
hope this helps a little
