It's too late for a witty title. Please forgive me and help fix this thing

July 13, 2009 8:47 PM

I have these two "folders" in my C drive that are just two of my external hard drives. I would either like them gone or to be given a really good reason to keep them.

I tried Google, can't remember at all what I searched for to figure out how to make these things appear in the first place.

They're not shortcuts. Somehow I added fake folders that seem to be mirrors of these external hard drives.

I went to delete them and I got the "Are you sure you want to remove the folder and all it's contents?" message, which combined with the fact that the folders aren't there when the hard drive is unplugged makes me think that would be a very bad move.

There are two reasons I want them gone. The first is that XP sits for what seems like forever on the Windows Loading screen (like I start it up and then take a shower and when I get out it's still loading or at best it's just starting to load my profile slow). I unplugged the hard drives before I got in the shower this morning and XP loaded in what seemed like no time at all.

The second is that Ad-Aware goes through these like regular folders (which make up about 96% of my hard drive space) which makes me scan go from 33 gigs of space to almost 800. Don't get me wrong, I have no problem with my drives be scanned. But if I can do it one drive at a time it would be so much easier.

So in short, I want these things gone and I'm feeling like a real idiot for not remembering how I got them there in the first place. I'm also accepting reasons for why I should keep them and/or add the other external hard drive to the C folder in the same way.

posted by theichibun to computers & internet (4 comments total)

Probably what you're looking to do is to undo linking created using the Windows "mklink" command. Does that sound familiar?
posted by Inspector.Gadget at 8:49 PM on July 13

If you go to Control Panel/Admininstrative Tools/Computer Management/Disk Management you can change the 'mount points' of drives, and you can remove the folder mounts and add drive letter mounts instead.
posted by alexei at 8:54 PM on July 13

@ Inspector.Gadget: Honestly, not really just from the name. When I looked it up it looked like it could have been it.

@alexei: This is most likely the way I did it in the first place, and seemed the safer way to go in case the mklink that Inspector.Gadget mentioned wasn't it. It was actually a tad easier than you wrote since I never got rid of the drive letter mounts.

Your answer was marked best because I know it worked for me.

That's why I love this place. I rack my brain trying to figure something out and someone here gets it in about 5 minutes.

As for my Windows taking that long to load, was it because it had that much hard drive to look through or because it was looking on external drives or some combination of the two?
posted by theichibun at 9:06 PM on July 13

As for my Windows taking that long to load, was it because it had that much hard drive to look through or because it was looking on external drives or some combination of the two?

Sounds like some kind of driver problem. Windows shouldn't need to "go through" a drive in order to mount it, I wouldn't think.
posted by delmoi at 9:39 PM on July 13