I would like to be able to map (or link) one logical folder or file to another on a different harddrive.
I have Virtual Ram HDD and I want to link game files from HDD to RAM ones.
I remember finding a program a couple years back that would trick the system into thinking one folder was really another, but I can't find it. I think it was JumpLink or something.
Anyway, I want to be able to do this:
When the system wants to access 'C:\Game\' it will really access 'X:\Game\' but still think it's on the former drive.
I am not looking to use 'subst' either. I just want to map that folder or and files to the other.
Sounds like you're talking about mounting a file system to a directory on a drive. A quick google search led me to this Server Fault Question: https://serverfault.com/questions/11350/is-it-possible-to-mount-unmount-a-physical-hard-drive-in-windows-xp
To quote Ramon,
Try mountvol [drive:]path /d. For, info type mountvol /? (just mountvol) in cmd.exe.
See that question for complete details and caveats.
This is what I was thinking about:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symbolic_link
Related
So I have quite a few "Grab'n'Go" Windows games and programs that I've stuffed onto an external harddrive, and it is a little daunting to have all their saves end up on my C: drive. What I'm looking to do, and I hope this can be done on Windows XP at the least (if not 7 or 10), is to create a BAT file to trick each program to save their files somewhere else but C:\Documents\User\My Documents, and preferably a different folder for each program (Dungeon Siege to G:\DS_saves, RCT3 to H:\RCT3, etc).
Is such a thing possible? And is it a different command per Windows version?
You can't "trick" games while they're running, since you have no access to their code or the running threads.
However, you can accomplish what you're trying to do by simply right-clicking the Documents folder, go to Properties, then Location and change the target folder.
This will change the directory for Documents in your system, and your games/apps will use the new folder even if it's on a different drive.
This can be done for all system default directories, and it's very useful for SSD-based machines where space is essential.
I am in the middle of writing a tool that finds lost files of an iTunes library, for both Mac and Windows. On the Mac, I can quickly find files by naming using the wonderful "CatalogSearch" function.
On Windows, however, there seems to be no OS API for searching by file name (or is there?).
After some googling, I learned that there are tools (like TFind, Everything) that read the NTFS directory directly and scan it to find files by name.
I would like to do the same, but without having to start from scratch (although I've written quite a few disk tools in the past, I've never had the energy to dig into NTFS).
I wonder if there are ready-made libs around, possibly as a .dll, that would give me this search feature: Pass in a file name, get back its path.
Alternatively, what about the Windows indexing service? At least when I tried this on a recently installed XP Home system, the Search operation under the Start menu would actually scan all directories, which suggests that it has no complete database. As I'm not a Windows user at all, I wonder why this isn't working.
In the end, the complete solution I need is: I have a list of file names to find, and I need code that searches the entire disk (or uses a DB for it) to get me all results in one go. E.g, the search should not start a new full scan for every file I'm looking up. That's why I think the MFT way would be optimal, as it could quickly iterate over all names, comparing each to my list.
The best way to solve your problem seems to be by using the Windows Change Journal.
Problem: If it is not enabled for a volume or the volume is a non-NTFS you need a fallback (or enable the Change Journal if it is NTFS). You need administrator rights as well to access the Change Journal.
You get the files by using the FSCTL_ENUM_USN_DATA and DeviceIOControll with LowUsn=0. This directly accesses the MFT and writes all filenames into the supplied buffer. Because it sequentially acesses the MFT it is faster than the FindFirstFile API.
I am in the middle of writing a tool that finds lost files of an iTunes library, for both Mac and Windows. On the Mac, I can quickly find files by naming using the wonderful "CatalogSearch" function.
On Windows, however, there seems to be no OS API for searching by file name (or is there?).
After some googling, I learned that there are tools (like TFind, Everything) that read the NTFS directory directly and scan it to find files by name.
I would like to do the same, but without having to start from scratch (although I've written quite a few disk tools in the past, I've never had the energy to dig into NTFS).
I wonder if there are ready-made libs around, possibly as a .dll, that would give me this search feature: Pass in a file name, get back its path.
Alternatively, what about the Windows indexing service? At least when I tried this on a recently installed XP Home system, the Search operation under the Start menu would actually scan all directories, which suggests that it has no complete database. As I'm not a Windows user at all, I wonder why this isn't working.
In the end, the complete solution I need is: I have a list of file names to find, and I need code that searches the entire disk (or uses a DB for it) to get me all results in one go. E.g, the search should not start a new full scan for every file I'm looking up. That's why I think the MFT way would be optimal, as it could quickly iterate over all names, comparing each to my list.
The best way to solve your problem seems to be by using the Windows Change Journal.
Problem: If it is not enabled for a volume or the volume is a non-NTFS you need a fallback (or enable the Change Journal if it is NTFS). You need administrator rights as well to access the Change Journal.
You get the files by using the FSCTL_ENUM_USN_DATA and DeviceIOControll with LowUsn=0. This directly accesses the MFT and writes all filenames into the supplied buffer. Because it sequentially acesses the MFT it is faster than the FindFirstFile API.
Linux has a feature called namespaces, which let you give a different "view" of the filesystem to different processes. In Windows terms, this would be useful for example if you had a legacy program "floyd" that always loaded its configuration from C:\floyd\floyd.ini. If Windows had namespaces, you could write a wrapper script which would create a namespace in which to run floyd, making it so when Alice ran the script, floyd would start up in an environment where C:\floyd existed but actually pointed to C:\Users\Alice\Floyd.
Now you may be thinking, "OK, just use soft or hard links and make C:\floyd an alias for C:\Users\Alice." But with namespaces, Bob can also run the startup script, but his instance of floyd (on the same computer, running at the same time) will see C:\floyd with the contents of, say, C:\Users\Bob\Program Settings\Floyd Config (or any other path we like).
You can do this on Linux with namespaces. Is there something similar or analogous on Windows? It's fine if it requires writing a C program, and it's OK if it only works on recent versions of Windows.
NTFS hard links are really a simple case of reparse points. Reparse points are typed, and can include more advanced behavior. For instance, they're also used for "offline storage" (transparent migration of files to and from secondary storage). You can therefore also use reparse points to implement per-user symbolic links, by creating a new reparse type.
The reparse point type even has an explicit "Name surrogate" bit, which (if set) indicates that reparse points of those types are some kind of symbolic link.
You can even have multiple reparse points in a path. Therefore files inside your symbolic namepace can still be migrated to secondary storage - you'd just have two reparse points in the path.
I think Virtual Store does this automatically for legacy programs that try to write to nonstandard directories. So the legacy program writes to a user- and program-specific directory instead to C:\floyd.
This sounds like Windows Vista's file system virtualization. For example, it can silently redirect c:\Program Files\Floyd to c:\Users\<username>\AppData\Local\VirtualStore\Program Files\Floyd. However, file system virtualization isn't nearly as configurable as Linux namespaces. From what I can tell from reading, file system virtualization should apply any time a 32-bit interactive process opens for writing a file, folder, or registry key that's only writable by administrators. (So you typically end up with some read-only files under c:\Program Files and some per-user writable files under c:\Users\<username>\AppData\Local\VirtalStore.)
An application virtualization product can probably also do this, although those are often more complicated and more expensive.
You can use hardlinks for that, but only with NTFS. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_link
I think windows doesn't have virtual FS view per process.
The most relevant thing is probably special environment folders, such as %temp%, %appdata%, %localappdata%. Not that they're equivalent, but they fulfil the same purpose.
You can define your own environment variables then use '%myspecialplace%\myfile.txt' to access them.
As a horrid kludge (and here I book my passage to programming hell) could you use a NamedPipe for C:\Floyd that mapped the IO operations onto a file specific to the current process user?
I know it's not pretty and I don't know enough about NamedPipes (FIFOs in other dialects) on Windows to know how feasible this is.
Dan
There are several things that come to my mind.
First of all you can create a file system filter driver (or use a ready driver, such as our CallbackFilter product) that would redirect all file system calls, coming from the application, to other location. This is close to virtualization that you mentioned but this won't change the list of drive letters though. Such approach is both powerful and non-trivial, so see the other option first of all.
And the other option is:
there exist several products (Thinstall, Molebox if memory serves) that "wrap" the application redirecting it's file I/O to some other location. There was also some SDK to do the same, but I don't remember it's name at all.
e.g. http://www.msigeek.com/4819/file-re-direction-using-correctfilepaths-shim-to-fix-broken-applications
But I think it's not configurable per user, although the target can vary per-user based on environment variable substitution.
Most programs, though, store configuration in the registry, in which case RegOverridePredefKey would do the trick.
There's a shortage of good solutions for this. For simplicity, I can't improve on using NTFS soft links (junctions) for this - as you correctly point out, this creates issues if you want per-user configuration. As MSalters correctly says, all NTFS soft and hard links are just special cases of reparse points, so you could do something more general by impplementing a new reparse type, if you don't mind some work digging into NTFS..
(Junction is a pretty useful tool when experimenting with NTFS soft links: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb896768.aspx )
You could just take a direct approach - give each user (or your program initialization if you only care about one piece of software) a logon script that sets up the appropriate junction into their user directory (and make sure you clean it up afterwards). But it's clumsy.
In general the right Windows approach is to put things into the folders pointed at by the %localappdata% (from Vista on) and, more generally, %userprofile% system variables.
Win file system virtualization is intended to ensure this in the cases where it applies.
I'm interested to know if there's any method/mechanism to roll my own virtual file system that will run on modern windows. The idea would be that no matter what part of the operating system tried to access files under the directory I "control", all of the operations are filtered through some kind of callback code. If not, is there a fundamental reason why?
You absolutely can do this, it's called a "reparse point". See MSDN for the details.
Eugene is correct... you want to look at the documentation for File System Filters, not for reparse points.
Take a look at the TrueCrypt source code its open source and it does something very close to what you want: "# Creates a virtual encrypted disk within a file and mounts it as a real disk."