Try the following experiment at your leasure in a Windows XP 64 box:
- Run Internet explorer, non-64bit version, or any other 32-bit program.
- Do file/open and browse to
c:\windows\system32\drivers
. Note that there are (typically) no files in this directory. - Open a command shell with Start/Run/cmd and do
dir c:\windows\system32\drivers
.
The result is that you see a different set of files. That is, the same path refers to two different physical locations on the hard disk! What is the explanation for this? How can a 32-bit program (e.g. bash) refer to the "real" c:\windows\system32\drivers
directory?