creating symbolic links on networked drive

I'm trying to better organize my public folder at work and I need to maintain old links that I have emailed to people in the past. I'm thinking of creating symbolic links so that I can maintain those old folder links while moving my folders and files where I want them.

Unfortunately, I can't seem to do this because I'm working on networked drives.

Issuing the following command:

mklink /J "\\networkDrv\users\Me\Force Tester" "\\networkDrv\users\Me\File Store\Lappers\ASL_ABL\Code\Force Tester"

results in this error:

Local NTFS volumes are required to complete the operation.

Solution 1:

Try running command prompt as administrator and with the /D switch instead.

mklink /D "\\networkDrv\users\Me\Force Tester" "\\networkDrv\users\Me\File Store\Lappers\ASL_ABL\Code\Force Tester"

Run mklink /? from command prompt to get more details of the options of this command.

Creates a symbolic link.

MKLINK [[/D] | [/H] | [/J]] Link Target

        /D      Creates a directory symbolic link.  Default is a file
                symbolic link.
        /H      Creates a hard link instead of a symbolic link.
        /J      Creates a Directory Junction.
        Link    specifies the new symbolic link name.
        Target  specifies the path (relative or absolute) that the new link
                refers to.

Access Denied Fix

If you run the mklink /D command as administrator and the Link part of the command is a UNC network path and you get Access Denied error message, then follow the below to potentially resolve this issue.

1. On there server where (and/or on the Windows client PC you're getting the Access Denied error message when you run the command) the Link part of the command is located, run this command as administrator on the server: fsutil behavior query SymlinkEvaluation
2. If you see Remote to remote symbolic links are disabled. then run this command: fsutil behavior set SymlinkEvaluation R2R:1
   • You can run this from the location where you're running the MKLINK command and getting access denied whether on the Windows Server itself or the Windows client PC
3. Now try running your command again and hopefully it works successfully now.

Link Reference: Access is denied on mklink