Beyond

Scenario: You’re in need of extra disk space - Your 320GB disk just isn’t big enough for all those films and music tracks: Naturally you buy a 1TB HDD and install it as an extra drive.

While formatting the drive in NTFS is taking place, the cogs in your mind start whirring and you start thinking that you’d like some kind of order to files that you put onto this new and rather large drive:

For instance; you’d like a separate group for films, one for music, another for pictures, and one for edits.

That’s around 250GB for each section: You could partition the drive into four sections; one for each group; or alternatively you could map a drive letter to four nested folders so that you can access the nested subfolders just as easily as you can access shared folders on your network.

Here’s how to do the latter:-

We’ll continue working from the above example; although your particular pathnames, foldernames, and drive letters used may vary:

To do this we’ll use a little-known DOS command, which is still viable in XP, called “subst“: “Subst” associates a drive letter with any folder. Here’s how to use “subst“:

subst x: {drive}:\{pathname}\foldername}

Or for the example above:

subst x: {drive}:\{foldername}

- Where x: is any available drive letter and {pathname}\foldername} is the complete path to your selected folder.

So using the example situation above, having created the relevant folders (films, music, pictures & porn) on your new E: drive that you’ve just bought and installed, you would type at the command prompt:

“subst F: E: \films¬” (¬ means press return(enter))

“subst G: E:\ music¬”

“subst H: E:\ pictures¬”

“subst J: E: \edits¬”

Now you can get straight to the films folder by accessing drive F: in My Computer, and so on… At the same time all four folders are still accessible in drive E:

If you wanted to associate a drive letter with a subfolder of the films folder; you could open a command prompt and type:

“subst K: E:\films\comedy¬”

- For example.