Bryan O'Connor | 18 April 2013
Do you find that you don’t have enough drive letters to connect to all your disks? Then creating mount points to those disks maybe your answer. Also Links allow you yo hide the identity and location of files.
One of the courses I teach is the
Microsoft Windows 2012 Installing and Configuring course, the
Microsoft designation is the 20410B
.
In the presentation, we look at configuring Mount Points and
Links.
Mount Points
Mount points are used in Windows operating systems to make
a portion of a disk or the entire disk useable by the operating
system. Most commonly, mount points are associated with
drive-letter mappings so that the operating system can gain access
to the disk through the drive letter.
Since the Windows 2000 Server was first introduced, you have been
able to enable volume mount points, which you can then use to mount
a hard disk to an empty folder that is located on another drive.
For example, if you add a new hard disk to a server, rather than
mounting the drive using a drive letter, you can assign a folder
name such as C:\datadrive to the drive. When you do this, any time
you access the C:\datadrive folder, you are actually accessing the
new hard disk.
Volume mount points can be useful in the following scenarios:
If you are running out of drive space on a server and you want to
add disk space without modifying the folder structure. You can add
the hard disk, and configure a folder to point to the hard
disk.
If you are running out of available letters to assign to partitions
or volumes. If you have several hard disks that are attached to the
server, you may run out of available letters in the alphabet to
which to assign drive letters. By using a volume mount point, you
can add additional partitions or volumes without using more drive
letters.
If you need to separate disk input/output (I/O) within a folder
structure. For example, if you are using an application that
requires a specific file structure, but which uses the hard disks
extensively, you can separate the disk I/O by creating a volume
mount point within the folder structure.
Links
Alinkis a special type of file that contains a reference
to another file or directory in the form of an absolute or relative
path. Windows supports the following two types of links:
A symbolic file link (also known as asoft link)
A symbolic directory link (also known as adirectory junction)
A link that is stored on a server share could refer back to a
directory on a client that is not actually accessible from the
server where the link is stored. Because the link processing is
done from the client, the link would work correctly to access the
client, even though the server cannot access the client.
Links operate transparently. Applications that read or write to
files that are named by a link behave as if they are operating
directly on the target file. For example, you can use a symbolic
link to link to a Hyper-V parent virtual hard disk file (.vhd) from
another location. Hyper-V uses the link to work with the parent
virtual hard disk (VHD) as it would the original file. The benefit
of using symbolic links is that you do not need to modify the
properties of your differencing VHD.
Links are sometimes easier to manage than mount points. Mount
points force you to place the files on the root of the volumes,
whereas with links you can be more flexible with where you save
files.
You can create links by using the mklink.exe command-line
tool.
The demonstration is available at the
BryanQA Youtube site