mklink fails to create symlink on network drive

Solution 1:

I was able to make this work with two changes: running the command prompt as administrator and granting the "create symbolic links" privilege to the user account on the machine hosting the network share.

Privileges can be configured with the Local Security Policy snap-in, secpol.msc. Open that on the computer where the network share is stored, navigate into Local Policies | User Rights Assignment, and open the "create symbolic links" item. Add the account you use to authenticate to the network share.

While one might not expect the privileges of your account on your machine to matter in this case, I suspect that mklink tries to enable the symbolic link privilege unconditionally. If that fails, it cannot issue the link creation command even if the other machine would accept it. Alternatively, you can grant yourself the "create symbolic links" privilege on your machine and not have to run as administrator.