I've just been sweating through a common problem that exemplifies Microsoft's penchant for bad design: keeping drive letters straight when adding a hard drive or reconfiguring partitions. The problem, as most folks here probably know, is that if you add a hard drive or a disk partition to your system, drive letters change in a way that you cannot control or modify. That naturally messes up all references to files on the drives whose letters have changed. And needless to say, Unix (ergo Linux) has a perfectly straightforward solution to the problem: all devices hang off the root filesystem via mounts. You rejigger a drive, you change /etc/fstab and that's the end of it. Of course, Windows is stuck with the problem of backward compatibility. Yet ironically enough, at one time DOS (yes, DOS!) supported a workaround with the SUBST command that enabled you to redefine one drive letter into another. With SUBST you could work entirely with virtual drive letters and never have to reference the real ones. SUBST went out with the transition to Win 3.1, I believe; I haven't seen it for years. The real maldesign, though, is that there is a simple way that MS could have its cake of backward compatibility and still provide flexibility in adding hard drives: provide a "reverse SUBST" that would associate a directory with a drive. In other words, something like C:\AUX_DRIVE would be associated with, say, the G: drive. That would make C:\ equivalent to the Linux root, and all file references would then be to locations on the C drive. Why not? Paul