[mdlug] Minor note on NTFS support - junctions

Ingles, Raymond Raymond.Ingles at dynatrace.com
Mon Dec 14 10:22:34 EST 2015


Ran into an interesting if minor snag last week. I have a dual-boot system, Windows 7 and Xubuntu 14.04. I have a fair amount of storage but my boys and I, with Steam bundles and such, have managed to fill up a fair amount of space.

I replaced a 500GB drive with a 2TB one, used Windows to format the disk NTFS, and then used a USB-SATA adapter on Linux to copy the data over. Almost everything worked, but as I said, I ran into a snag.

I have an SSD with some space for games that take a while to load. I use a Windows junction (essentially a Windows symlink for directories) to link from the Steam library to the directory on the SSD. That copied over under Linux, but under Windows the junction (a) wasn't visible in the directory listing, and (b) could not be deleted, but (c) could not be replaced with a valid link, either. What I had to finally do was boot into Linux, remove the junction, and then boot back into Windows and re-create the junction.

Just in case any of y'all run into a similar situation.


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