Is there a documentation describing "full" windows directory structure?

Question

I simply would like to have and study the way directories are in windows nt versions more specific 7, 10. I've searched a bit and i haven't found any kind of full documentation about that. I know it's complicated the way windows is, but theres got to be some fully described top-down documentation of windows default apllications and their location and why it is stored in that place and not any other.

I know i could identify each folder, app individually but thats not what i'm looking for.

I am not looking for information only about windows top directiories like that: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Directory_structure

Answer 1

(Disclaimer: I worked at Microsoft and while I wasn't in OSG (I was in STB/DevDiv) I browsed enough of the internal documentation and Windows source-code out of my own curiosity to get a general idea - but don't take my answer as authoritative as I'm sure someone with better first-hand experience can probably answer better than I can)

I know it's complicated the way windows is, but theres got to be some fully described top-down documentation of windows default apllications and their location and why it is stored in that place and not any other.

Short answer: There isn't a publicly accessible single authoritative catalog or documentation of the C:\Windows\... filesystem structure. When I was at Microsoft there wasn't even a single catalog available internally (at least, not that I was aware of - again, I wasn't in OSG so there may have been some tribal knowledge I missed-out on - or it was buried in an internal SharePoint site) - though individual feature teams did generally keep their own documentation for the changes they introduced, of course - and at least tried to maintain any inherited documentation from older teams since disbanded - that said, there's also an intentional dearth of documentation and material internally regarding Windows between 1995 and 2002 thanks to the Sun Java lawsuit (the paranoid lawyers in LCA yanked all internal builds of Windows 95 through Windows XP SP1 and lots of associated documentation, unfortunately - I had to get special approval from my skip-level to get a copy of Windows 2000 when I was doing some historical research for my team in 2013).

As for "why" Windows's C:\Windows is the way it is - it's largely a product of its own history and Microsoft's honorable quest for backwards-compatibility rather than a contrived grand design. I recommend starting off at the beginning with Windows 1.0 (you can find a VM image with it preinstalled if you know where to look) through Windows 3.0 - things really take shape with Windows 95. The next big change was in Windows 2000 (inherited by Windows XP) and then Windows XP x64 (which gave us SysWow64 for 32-bit files and System32 for 64-bit files - yeah, it's silly). Other than Vista adding MUI subfolders for localized resources there haven't been many significant user-visible changes since then.

Each Windows feature team will have their own ideas about where they want to put their files in a Windows installation - and about how much they want to document it for TechNet. Granted, there are conventions that apply (and plenty of people to tell them they have a bad idea) - but for example, there was no overriding technical reason why the Windows Media Center folk put their files in C:\Windows\ehome instead of C:\Program Files\Windows Media Center or C:\Windows\System32\ehome (given that System32 is already home to plenty of non-kernel components).

Also, remember that many key components of Windows don't live in C:\Windows at all, such as the bootloader (which lives on its own EFI partition), many userland and pack-in applications that are under C:\Program Files, and Microsoft's push to greater componentize the operating-system via AppX, so things like MSPaint will eventually live under C:\Program Files\WindowsApps\.