Rick's World

It figures. Just when I start to think that Microsoft has finally gotten their act together and produced a stable operating system in Windows XP, they prove me wrong!

In my previous article "A 'Mount'ing problem in Windows", I described a way to mount an external drive to a subdirectory rather than mounting it to a drive letter, as is the standard in Windows. It turns out that this trick can come back and bite you really bad if you aren't very careful.

I had mounted several external drives to subdirectories on one of my computers. These external drives where actually the different card slots on an external memory card reader. The mounting trick worked well in that I was able to access the readers as subdirectories rather than drive letters. It was a little strange seeing the drive icon on a subdirectory, but it worked. Yesterday, I had a problem with the same hard drive that I had mounted these to subdirectories of. I was in the process of moving all the files off this hard drive so I could reformat it. In the process of moving all the files, I inadvertently tried to move these mounted subdirectories. Windows XP did not like this! As soon as it tried to move these mounted subdiretories, Windows proceeded to crash, giving me the infamous Blue Screen of Death and then reboot! This was the first time I've seen one of these BSODs in a long time.

I am not a big fan of Microsoft, yet I use their software because I had little choice. I am a huge fan of Linux, however. Linux has this same capability to mount external drives as subdirectories (in fact that's the only way to do it) and it has never crashed on me! I was grudgingly beginning to admit that Microsoft had improved things.

Thank you, Microsoft, for renewing my lack of faith in you.