> They could also support mounting extra drives to directories under C: so that the user would never have to deal with other drive letters. The "C:" would just

> They could also support mounting extra drives to directories under C: so that the user would never have to deal with other drive letters. The "C:" would just be a historical prefix but in practice it wouldn't matter because you could mount your second disk at C:\Program Files\ and the applications wouldn't even know about it. I vaguely remember that WinNT kernel could actually do this, however it's apparently well-hidden from users because I don't see this having been set up anywhere. Windows can indeed do this (since Windows 2000). It's not necessarily hidden, but the OS defaults to using drive letters for (new) partitions and most people don't mind. In Disk Management you can assign not only drive letters but also mount points for a partition (or both). I suppose you are left with the C-drive to be more or less / like you mentioned. I don't know if programs run into trouble because of hard coding of paths but that wouldn't be so much Microsoft's fault I think. I used to mount a USB-stick this way because it only contained a Truecrypt container, which would get its own drive letter thru Truecrypt so I didn't care to have two drive letters for one piece of storage. :) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NTFS_volume_mount_point https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NTFS_volume_mount_point