Junction points - can they help make deamon tools better?

[Princess_Frosty]

I've just recently found out about junction points which is a feature of the NTFS 5.0 (and above) file system.

It allows you to map a "target" directory to another "host" directory, for example

host dir = C:\hostdir\
target dir = E:\targetdir\

Your file structure gets mapped from the host to the target, so if you were to browse to C:\hostdir\ and look in that directory you'd be actually seeing files in E:\targetdir\

Now this is not a shortcut, this is very low level, there are NO tools available in the standard copies of windows 2000 or XP to allow you to create these Junction points, however people have assembled API's for doing so. This is completely transparent to applications, and even lower level functions such as dos commands work "through" the junction node as well.

I was wondering if this sort of thing would be helpful at any level for helping create deamon tools better when it comes to allowing it to hide from anti piracy applications, im not sure exactly what use it could have but im sure you boffins might be able to find a way to put it to some good use.

Link to an application which can create/edit/delete junction nodes - http://www.rekenwonder.com/linkmagic.htm

You can get linked to his API from there and all his documentation as well.

Further note that someone else has managed this will mapping drives as well as just directorys, again might be of some use, you can find links from his site.

Apologies if this is not helpful, but i love Daemon Tools, used it for as long as I can remember and thing you guys do fantastic job. I'll get some testing done with this when I get home from work, theres some interesting potential side effects such as directories that are mapped to directories in which they reside (potential loop or never ending directory length?) if I think of any specific Ideas to help i'll let you know.

[Jito463]

Well, I know you can already map drives to a directory on an NTFS partition using Disk Management (f.e. D drive would become C:\Folder name). You can also mount a directory as a drive using subst.exe (f.e. C:\Folder name would become E drive). That you can map one directory into another directory doesn't surprise me, nor does the fact it was hidden (consider your potential side effects, support nightmare for MS). I don't know how this could possible help DT though, as games will not recognize an image that's mounted as a directory, only one that's mounted as a CD/DVD.

*EDIT*
Accursed smilies

[Princess_Frosty]

Well first of all you can mount volumes/drives as well as just other directories, but this is transparent to applcaitions. It would allow you to effectivly take a root directory and fake its location amongst other things.

For instance your DVD drive could easily be mapped to C:\program files\daemontools\DVD\ and no application would be any the wiser, it maps it at such a low level.

As I said before theres some potentialy strange side effects of certain combinations of host and target folders which could be helpful, with a little imagination I think it could be helpful in some way.

[AnalCobra]

It's like when you use linux, you can mount any Harddisk on another folder of the data structure. If your home folder has no more space you can just mount another harddisk/partition on this folder an then you have much more space in this folder.