To shell and back

You probably know that you can mount a disk at a certain directory in Windows, just like you can in Unix. However, if you want to mount “Program Files”, you have to jump through a few hoops.

To mount a drive at a directory, here is what we generally do:

1. Create the directory
2. Mount the disk (using Computer Management or ‘diskpart’)
3. copy all existing files (if we are moving an existing directory) into the newly mounted disk

The problem here is that Windows does not let you rename the existing “Program Files” directory, which means that we cannot create an empty folder by the same name to mount the new disk. It is easy to do this, if you have a dual boot configuration. If you don’t, just use any Linux Live-CD (I used ubuntu).

So, here are the steps:

1. Reboot to Linux. Copy all files in “Program Files” to the new disk.
2. Rename “Program Files” to P1. (Or if you are feeling lucky, you can delete “Program Files”)
3. Create a new directory named “Program Files”.
4. Reboot. Press F8 to enter “Windows” boot options. Select “Safe-Mode with Command Prompt”.
5. Type “diskpart”, to get the diskpart prompt.
6. Type “select disk N”, to select the disk which will be mounted.
7. Type “select partition N” to select the current partition, this should be the new partition that we are mounting.
8. Type “assign mount=Progra~1″
9. Reboot.

You would have successfully mounted a new partition at “Program Files”.