Symbolic links/folders on Windows

[kalniel]

From time to time I do a bit of fantasising about future computer purchases, and currently these imaginations are involving combinations of flash and mechanical hard drives.

Rather than keeping the entire OS on one drive, I was wondering whether it's possible to set up the equivalent of symbolic links or mounted paths so I could have the majority of the read components on the flash drive but have temporary files/folders on the mechanical drive?

At the moment I know you can move specific types of folders to different drives (pagefile, temporary internet files, my documents) but this seems to be only with Window's blessing, rather than being able to setup files/folders of my choice or in a way that is completly transparant to the program using them.

Does anyone know if such a thing is possible in Vista or mooted future versions of Windows?

[TheAnimus]

well its been in since the newer version of NTFS.

the thing is there is a damn good reason why people don't use them, they are so damned confusing. the same goes with multiple streams for a single file. Its a feature, but please don't use it.

anyway, as your probably going to use it anyway because its just your PC:
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/s.../bb896768.aspx

Also you can mount an entire drive partition as a folder too. I've done this before when i wanted a logical file structure, but also a nice quick shortcut (ie been able to type f: rather than C:\Code\)

[kalniel]

Thanks.

Are junctions truly transparent to the program calling them?

[TheAnimus]

unless they bother to query a special API, they have no way of knowing.

[kalniel]

Cool.

Ok, another question.. is there a free way of creating a ramdisk that can contain very temporary folders?