Questions about mounting drives as NTFS folders

[MrCrispy]

I've setup Vista to mount all external drives as external folders. So I've set up folders under "d:\External Drives", which really are junction points, and then any time the drive is plugged in it is mounted there. This way it doesn't get a random drive letter, and my backup scripts use the same path. IMO this is a killer feature in Windows which not many are aware of.

But I have a few issues -

1. The free space shown is for the d:\ drive, which contains the junction point. As far as I can tell, there is no way to tell the actual free vs used space on the drive, without going into disk management. This has caused big problems because backup programs, explorer etc have no idea there is not enough space left to copy.

2. It is not easy to tell which folder has a mounted drive. When I try to open one which is not, I get an error message. There is a slight color difference in the icons for the two, but its easy to mistake them.

3. Is there a single place which can show me all mounted volumes. Something like an explorer namespace  called "Mounted Volumes" which will then list all active reparse points.

Is there a way to make the user experience better? Are there any utilities for this (prefer freeware)?

[Target]

HA! been there, done that, so I feel your pain

perhaps look at <a href="http://blueonionsoft...e.aspx'>Desk Drive</a> which claims to manage your USB connections.  I haven't used it so I can't comment (I don't really have a need for it) but it may do what you want

I went back to using drive letters both because of the freespace issue and because I couldn't ID a given (USB) drive if I wanted to remove it (they just come up as a generic device), and while there is a way around this, it's much longer and I'm waaaay too lazy... 



 

[MrCrispy]

Ok, this sounds like yet another feature built into NTFS (like ADS), which has NO support in the shell, so its not very usable.