Can I set up arbitrary filesystem redirection in Windows?

Posted by Jon on Super User See other posts from Super User or by Jon
Published on 2013-06-29T19:40:51Z Indexed on 2013/06/29 22:23 UTC
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I am sitting in front of a Windows 7 machine that has no drive Q:.

Is it possible to arrange for accesses to Q:\somedir to be redirected to an arbitrary location on the existing filesystems (for example, C:\Windows)? I would especially like a "set it and forget it" option, if one exists.

I am assuming (although I have not tried it) that it is possible to use SUBST to mount an existing (empty, created for this purpose) folder as drive Q: and then MKLINK /J to create a directory symbolic link from Q:\somedir to wherever I want. However, this approach has a couple of drawbacks that I would like to avoid if possible:

  1. The drive Q: will be visible in the system.
  2. It is not as clean as I would like (removing the mounted folder will break it; a batch script needs to be manually added to the system startup).

Is there a better option? If there is none and I am forced to make compromises, what is the closest I could get to the ideal solution? Assume anything is up for discussion.

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