Multiple Drives As One Directory

[darrin75]

Multiple Drives As One Directory? This would be Nice to have it all in one place, I have many mpg's on multiple drives that i would to see as one directory on gbpvr. See how many suggestions We can come up with, although Dynamic disk is option, but not all people have this option, i know i don't on home edition xp. Its on professional though..Come On, this would be cool...Video archiver if you are there i could swear that your plugin done something to this effect???

[Huw]

just create shortcuts to the drives

[reven]

shortcuts wouldnt work, they are files, hes trying to get it to work in "my videos" which would just see the shortcut as a file which isnt a video or directory so it would just skip over it. trying to network or setup a virtual directory with the contents of mulitple directories.

[bgowland]

Quote[/b] (darrin75 @ Dec. 19 2004,06:09)]...Dynamic disk is option, but not all people have this option, i know i don't on home edition xp.

According to the link below, the command MountVol is available on XP Home if you are using NTFS. Haven't tried it though as I have XP Pro.

Brian

XP Home Reference - MountVol

[yuss]

If you are using Windows XP Pro, look at the "Dynamic Disks" option.

[normanr]

On Windows 2000, XP Pro and 2003 you can use the linkd utility (download the resource kit to get it) to 'graft' any valid directory name or device name onto a NTFS directory. Sysinternals have their Junction utility which does the same thing.

[fischer98]

Two ways you can do this (I use pro, though, don't know if this will work on home)
1. Create an empty folder in you main Video folder
2. Open Computer Management (Rt. click on my computer and choose 'Manage'
3. Under Storage, click on disk management
4. Right click on the drive (in the right side pane) that you wish to add to your main video folder and choose "Change Drive Letters and Paths"
5. In the dialog box that comes up, click add
6. In the next dialog box, choose "Mount in the following empty NTFS folder" (thought... this probably doesn't work if your drive uses FAT file system), then browse to the folder you created in step 1.
7. Click all the ok's to apply changes.

This will mount an entire drive into a folder of another drive. You can also mount a single folder on one drive to a folder of another drive. To do this, download the Windows 2003 Resource Kit (google windows 2003 resource kit and choose the first link). There is a utility with the kit called "linkd" that you use from the command line. Read the help that comes with on how to use it. It's pretty easy.

[darrin75]

yeah i have already done this, but this does not put all files in one directory..

[chenko]

Quote[/b] (darrin75 @ Dec. 19 2004,16:48)]yeah i have already done this, but this does not put all files in one directory..

You will need to use RAID0 to spread your partition across multiple drives.
For some reason it seems to have disappeared in XP (even XP Pro) to do this from software (not bootable so cannot be on your install partition)

Alot of modern boards now have onboard raid of some kind, just join two together in an array in the RAID bios (should show up after the motherboard bios) and it will show as a single drive in windows. Alternativly buy a basic ATA RAID card, shouldn't set you back that much.


Downsides with RAID0 is if one HDD goes down, you pretty much lose it all since packets will be spread across the 2+ drives. Also, If you have anything on the drives they will have to be moved somewhere else so you can create the RAID Array.

[jorm]

You want to see the super set of all mpeg files on different drives in gbpvr. Doing it in the individual plugin is fairly easy.

Just provide a list of directories to search perhaps in the skin and the code would create a structure that has the directory name that it uses for a hashtable the object you insert into the hashtable would be a string filename that would have the right directory. I do that in xrecord for the videos.

So c:\videos\stargate
and d:\videos\stargate would be combined inside of gbpvr.