symbolic link OS components

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Autochthon

Limp Gawd
Joined
Apr 28, 2005
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Hypothetical - I've never tried this in windows. Say one has 2 small SSD's with OS installed on one. Space is getting a bit tight for installation of \users\... folders. Is there any problem with symbolically linking the \user folder from the second SSD?
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if you are referring to mlink, then it's possible.
a lot of steam users with SSDs use mlink to get around the massive game folder issue when steam is installed on their boot (SSD) drive.
 
isn't it also possible to mount a drive to a folder location (at least, I keep seeing it in the disk manager in windows)... couldn't you simply move the user folder somewhere, and mount the second SSD to the User folder location?
 
You can do it, I moved my public users folder that way, but it wasn't as easy as moving some other folders (like Steam folders). If I remember correctly, it required some command line/safe mode work - but it has been a while since I did it. It might be easier with a normal user folder though - if I remember correctly the issue I had was that you can't delete the original folder location, so you can't drop the junction where it needs to be - and for some reason the "move folder location" option wasn't available to me.
 
There's no reason why you couldn't do it. I do it all the time for SSD dedicated OS installs. Even Windows XP, as old as it is, supports symbolic linking.

And as mentioned previously, it's really handy for selective Steam titles.

The only issue woud be if you are wanting to not use a hard drive at all. Then you get into questionable SSD wear-level issues due to the OS writing to the swap file at high frequency. I guess you could disable swap altogether, but I've always had some form of a hard drive available for a swap file and temp space.
 
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