Are the NTFS directory junctions mounted before Windows boot?

[Luca Villa]

I bought a SATA SSD drive that is many times faster than my harddisk
but it's only 32GB.
I see it as D: under my Windows Vista.
It's so fast that I moved my pagefile.sys to it and I had another
idea: to move the C:\WINDOWS directory to it and create a directory
junction that binds a virtual directory C:\WINDOWS to the real
directory D:\WINDOWS where I will move all the Windows files to.

Do you think that Windows will be able to boot from that directory
junction? is the directory junction "mounted" before the Windows files
are read during the boot?

 

[Rick Rogers]

Hi,

Don't do it. If you want to run from that drive, install to that drive. You
can't mount a folder there until the OS loads, and if the OS is there it
cannot load.

--
Best of Luck,

Rick Rogers, aka "Nutcase" - Microsoft MVP

Windows help - www.rickrogers.org
My thoughts http://rick-mvp.blogspot.com

 

[Luca Villa]

Isn't the directory junction support an integrated feature of NTFS
like for example the file compression?
For analogy, do you think that I can't compress (NTFS) Windows boot
files as well?

 

[Rick Rogers]

Hi,

Yes, but until the OS is loaded to read the file system nothing is going to
happen.

--
Best of Luck,

Rick Rogers, aka "Nutcase" - Microsoft MVP

Windows help - www.rickrogers.org
My thoughts http://rick-mvp.blogspot.com

 

[Luca Villa]

but until the OS is loaded to read the file system nothing is going to happen

When exactly the OS loads the file system driver?
I believe that it loads the file system driver before ANY file is
read, including the files in the root of C:\ and in c:\Windows.
If the NTFS file system driver includes the directory junction support
why can't it work?

 

[Luca Villa]

According to the document at http://warp.senecac.on.ca/peter/ios110/coursenotes/week7_boot.ppt,
and the first part of the Microsoft document
http://technet2.microsoft.com/windo...bf8e-4164-862d-dac5418c59481033.mspx?mfr=true,
the file ntfs.sys seems to be the first real file read, and it seems
to be read before the operating system.

Now my doubts are:
- how can the system read c:\windows\system32\drivers\ntfs.sys from
the NTFS drive before itself is loaded?
- can't I just move it to c:\ to solve my problem of having c:\windows
as directory junction?


"When the Power is turned on:

The BIOS, which is a chip on the motherboard is in control of the PC.
The first instruction to the processor is a "wake up" call to resume
full power.
Then the BIOS performs a POST test to check hardware and memory
If OK you hear a "short beep" which means the POST was successful
Then the BIOS transfers control to the MBR which scans the partition
table looking for the system partition
The system partition is the "active partition" and when a partition is
active, a "flag" in the boot sector is turned on, which points to the
operating system boot files on the system partition (the boot files
are always located at Sector 0 of the partition)

After the Ntldr loads, which is the flash screen with the progress bar
at the bottom, the OS begins to load the NTFS.sys file system.
Boot.ini is the second file, but the OS would NOT be able to load the
boot.ini into memory from the disk drive, (it's a text file) if part
of the NTFS.sys which is the driver for the NTFS file system had not
been loaded first.

After the NTFS.SYS file system has finished loading, the operating
system transitions the microprocessor from Real Mode to Protected
Mode, and loads the NToskrnl.exe file, which in turn loads the
remaining parts of Windows."