Mounting a Volume Question

susuandme

Can someone explain in simple terms why choice "2" is the correct answer.
and can you explain more about these subfolders with folders, why they
are necessary ...sometimes. and If I use the "subfolder" method will the
main folder still have to be empty, as well as the subfolder. And where should I put the data meanwhile to make the folder empty ?


You are the desktop administrator for your company. A user of a Windows XP Professional computer often downloads large files from the Internet and saves them in a Downloads folder on the computer’s C: drive. Currently, 2.4 GB of data is in the Downloads folder, and the C: drive is becoming full. The computer has a single 20 GB hard drive, but only 15 GB is currently allocated to the C: drive. The other 5 GB has not yet been allocated.
You examine the C: drive and discover that it is currently formatted with FAT32 because the computer was upgraded from Windows 98. You convert the C: drive to NTFS.
You want to let the user continue to download files to the Downloads folder. What should you do?

1 .Create a 5 GB NTFS volume from the unallocated space. Mount the new volume as the Downloads folder.

2. Create a 5 GB NTFS volume from the unallocated space. Mount the new volume as a new subfolder of the Downloads folder.

3. Create a 5 GB FAT32 volume from the unallocated space. Mount the new volume as the Downloads folder.

skrpune

I found a tutorial on mounting a volume to a folder path in Windows that can find here. It gives a good run through of how the process works & what's possible/not possible.

Basically, you can only mount a volume to a folder path in NTFS (which rules out choice 3 since it mentions creating a FAT32 volume). You also can't mount a volume to a non-empty folder, so since the question doesn't make a mention of deleting or emptying the current contents of the Downloads folder, choice 1 is out.

That leaves choice 2, which involves creating a new subfolder in the Downloads folder - choice 2 still allows for the user to save files to the Downloads folder, meeting the criteria that the question is asking for. The fact that the "parent" folder (Downloads, in this case) has files in it is unimportant - it's the target folder for the mounted volume that has to be empty.

If you did want to have the mounted volume "point" to the Downloads folder itself, you'd have to empty out that folder first - either delete files or save them to elsewhere on the hard drive (if there's room which it doesn't seem like there is in this particular case) or save them to another medium (CD, DVD, USB stick, external HD, etc.).

susuandme

thanks it is more clear now, I just have a question
about the subfolder, and jargon they use.

When they say " mount a volume as a new subfolder of the downloads folder"

They are just saying really that they are linking the "Free Space" which is the 5 Gig Volume which will be the Drive now, to the "Subfolder" which is back on the C: Drive. And the "subfolder" has to be empty, because it is the
one that is being "linked", it is the target. Is this correct ?

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Also if you were talking about two different hardisks, instead of one hard
disk in the previous example. Would both hard disks have to be formatted with
NTFS ? The First Hard disk would contain an empty folder.,which would be
the target, and the second hardrive which contains all the extra space, would be the "mount" or the "mount point". or do I have the terminology backwards, they never really explain in the books which one is the "target" and which one is the "mount point". again its the network server jargon that they don't go into in the books clearly thanks

azjag

Yes this is correct. They are creating a link between a sub folder on C: with free space on I have seen this used, temporarily that is, in instances when the C: drive is running out of space and we were not in a position to move to a larger hard drive.

I would say both HD's need to be NTFS, but am not 100% sure an this moment. I actually use an example of your second question in my explanation. You would "mount " the free space on the second drive to the "mount point" or "subfolder" on the first hard drive.

skrpune

susuandme wrote:

thanks it is more clear now, I just have a question
about the subfolder, and jargon they use.

When they say " mount a volume as a new subfolder of the downloads folder"

They are just saying really that they are linking the "Free Space" which is the 5 Gig Volume which will be the Drive now, to the "Subfolder" which is back on the C: Drive. And the "subfolder" has to be empty, because it is the
one that is being "linked", it is the target. Is this correct ?

yes, although I'm not sure "linking" is the right way to put it since linking does imply other things in computer-speak. It's more like drive mapping than linking. You're basically creating a new map for your system, telling it that although it appears as if it's looking at folder X as a subfolder of Y, it's really over on another drive. It's just a way to make things look the same for the user without them having to worry about where their data is actually going.

susuandme wrote:

Also if you were talking about two different hardisks, instead of one hard
disk in the previous example. Would both hard disks have to be formatted with
NTFS ? The First Hard disk would contain an empty folder.,which would be
the target, and the second hardrive which contains all the extra space, would be the "mount" or the "mount point". or do I have the terminology backwards, they never really explain in the books which one is the "target" and which one is the "mount point". again its the network server jargon that they don't go into in the books clearly thanks

Technically only the HD where you want to create the subfolder to which the other volume/drive is mounted has to be NTFS, and I haven't found anything that says that the actual volume/drive that's being mounted has to be NTFS too.

The mount point is where the drive is mounted to, so it would be the folder/subfolder/location on the NTFS HD where it *looks* like the user is saving their info. (I tried to create a hot link but it doesn't seem to be working for this link so here's the full address: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mount_(computing) where I got that info.)The target is the actual physical location of the data, so it would be the drive/volume that was mounted to the folder/subfolder location. Think of the mounted drive/volume location as a dart board that's actually a hologram (or to stretch the imagination a little further, a black hole maybe): the user is thinking they're tossing (saving) their darts (data) at the dart board (volume mount) that's on their own wall (C drive), but it just *looks* like their target is the dart board and the target is actually somewhere else.