At 11.27 28/01/2004, you wrote:
Maybe I'm missing something obvious here, but on my Win2k system I can mount any partition I want on any (NTFS) directory, just like you can mount filesystems on directories in Unix.
It's not the same. There are subtle but important differences, that rarely show through everyday use but make the difference in complex scenarios. This is because the underlying model for filesystems is different: VFS on UNIX, IFS on Windows, and VFS is by far the best of the two. If it wasn't for the whole driver compatibility thingy, I wouldn't even have bothered with IFS, and would have gone straight for VFS. Just about the only thing about IFS that doesn't completely suck is the cache manager - the rest is forgettable garbage, and Microsoft's licensing of the IFS SDK hasn't helped either