FlipsideReality Once upon a time, in a land far far away…

9Dec/092

windows 7 mklink is actually useful.

Windows 7 ships with the ability to utilise NTFS's symlinks (did vista do this too?). I have used this to get around the fact that win7 x64 refuses to index networked folders, thus stopping me from adding my media library and music (samba share) to media player.

1. Create a temp folder on your hard drive i.e. c:\shares
2. Create another folder in the above folder. i.e. c:\shares\pictures
3. Link the Library to this folder.
4. Delete the folder (c:\shares\pictures).
5. Use the mklink in an elevated command prompt (start type 'cmd' and press ctrl+shift+enter) to make a symbolic link. Name the link the same as the folder you created above. i.e -
mklink /d c:\shares\pictures \\server\pictures
6. Done. Now you have a non-indexed network path as a library.

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Comments (2) Trackbacks (0)
  1. Why did you make c:\shares\pictures then delete it?
    Is media player to dum to link its library to a symlink folder?
    Or for that matter any windows prog?
    tis intriguing.

  2. It’s not media player, it’s windows 7 x64. There is a patch for the x86 version that allows networked drives to be indexed, and therefore added to libraries.


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