[mdlug] Minor note on NTFS support - junctions

[Ingles, Raymond]

Minor note: I did some tests yesterday, and Windows 7 doesn't handle copying NTFS junctions particularly well either. They become empty directories on the new drive. If I hadn't known where the targets were, it would have been very time-consuming to find the old junctions and fix them up.

In short: Symlinks on Windows are nowhere near as polished as those in Unix.

-----Original Message-----
From: mdlug-bounces at mdlug.org [mailto:mdlug-bounces at mdlug.org] On Behalf Of Ingles, Raymond
Sent: Monday, December 14, 2015 10:23 AM
To: mdlug at mdlug.org
Subject: [mdlug] Minor note on NTFS support - junctions

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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