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I used mklink to create a symbolic link /d to a hard drive.

Now, even though I am the owner, confirmed by the "Take Ownership" process, I cannot delete files located in this symbolic link. For example, if I navigate to the link folder E:\Movies which points to my Movies hard drive and I try to delete a folder, I get an error "You'll need to provide administrator permission to delete this folder". When I go to Properties > Security and check the ownership, my user name is listed as owner.

I can however delete the individual files within this folder, but I cannot delete the folder itself.

If I instead navigate directly to the hard drive and not throught he symbolic link, I can delete anything I want. I tried this with both mklink /d and junction /j.

Is there a setting or something that I am missing that is causing this? My intention was to create a symbolic link to this hard drive so that it would look like a folder with my Videos folder/library instead of a separate drive.

Any help is appreciated!

2 Answers 2

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You can try to open a administrator right CLI and delete with the command, RD /S /Q "The Full Path of Directory"

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    Nov 23, 2021 at 8:35
  • I understand that I could delete the files using the command line, but it would be a pain to do this every single time I need to delete a file from this 14TB hard drive. Should I have the ability to delete a file from this symbolic link or junction whenever I need to? Or is that a feature (or limitation) of a symbolic link - you can only delete a file from the actual target of the link? Nov 24, 2021 at 2:14
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Probably too late with this answer, but I figured I'd leave this for anyone else that runs into the issue. I ran into this same behavior trying to delete subfolders in Explorer when I had a junction at C:\Folder that linked to F:\Folder. Here's my best guess after experimenting and digging around for a while.

Cause: Assuming you have the proper permissions to the junction and the folder it links to, the permissions issue that comes up has nothing to do with the folders themselves - it's related to the recycling bin. Not having any insight into the Recycling Bin internals, I can only guess that the cross-drive junction results in Windows being unable to figure out which Recycling Bin to use. The permissions error goes away if you disable the Recycling Bin on either drive, which kind of supports the theory.

Solution: Either disable the Recycling Bin on one of the drives or delete folders in Explorer using Shift+Delete to bypass the Recycling Bin.

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