Vista: mklink command results in invalid directory name?

[Markbnj]

Hey guys, wonder if anyone has some insight on this one. I was playing around with mklink in Vista today, with an eye toward using it to free up some space on my C: drive, similar to what you might do in Linux with a symlink and /usr, for example.

Following some blog posts I read, I opened a command prompt, normal user privs, copied a small directory to my D drive, then renamed the source to name_old. I then did the following:

mklink /J name d:\where_name_is_now

After that I could see "<JUNCTION> name [D:\where_name_is_now]" in the directory listing for the original location. So far so good, and very similar to what I expected from doing it on linux.

I then tried to cd to the linked directory through the link...

C:\Parent>cd name
The directory name is invalid
C:\Parent>

Eh? What's that? I did some quick searching and saw this error referenced in lots of other contexts, but didn't see anything related to making a symlink. I did see reference to elevation, and belatedly considered that maybe I should have been admin when I did this. So I opened en elevated command window and tried to access the dir. Same result. I then went to the D: drive and tried to access the dir directly. Same result.

So, not sure what to think at this point. I can't access the directory, or delete it. Seems like I have a farked file system? Any ideas?

 

[ViRGE]

Don't use Junctions. Use a symbolic link. Junctions are crazy.

MKLINK [[/D] | [/COLOR] | [/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.

C:\test>mklink /d bar c:\windows
symbolic link created for bar <<===>> c:\windows

Edit: Also, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NTFS_junction_point

Never delete a junction point using Explorer, a del /s command, or other file system utilities that walk recursively into directory trees. These utilities will affect the target directory and all subdirectories. Instead, use the utilities described below to delete junction points.

 

[Markbnj]

Cool, thanks for the tip. I only used junction because the blog post I was reading said that /D didn't work right for directories. Oh well.

Edit: that worked great. Thanks again. Very slick. So now the big question: has anyone used a symlink to move Program Files to another drive?