Access is denied on mklink

I am trying to get a symlink working over a network drive.

I have already tried suggestions on questions already asked, such as running as administrator and checking if the directory already exists. Unfortunately it still gives me the following error:

C:\Windows\system32>mklink /d \\myserver\someLink \\myserver\mydir
Access is denied.

Any ideas how I could get this working? The local machine is running windows 7 and the remote machine is running windows server 2008 R2 standard.

3 Answers

I jumped through all the hoops:

1. Create a non-admin account (in my case, activated the guest account).
2. As Admin, run secpol.msc and grant this account Create Symbolic Link permissions.

3. runas /user:guest cmd to open a command window as the guest.

   only to get caught on the simplest problem: because I was running as guest, I didn't have write permissions within the directory. So,

4. As admin, change permissions in the target directory (where you want to make the link) to give write access to the non-admin user.

I had this while I wanted to create a hard link with mklink /H .... By removing the /H, the error vanished as well.

So if a symbolic link does the trick for you as well, you should try this.

This is a little silly, but make sure you're using /D (soft) or /J (hard) for directories or you'll get access denied.