Windows Vista - Access Denied? Cleaning Up Junctions for Sony VAIO

If you have a Sony VAIO, you may have the problem where some of the shortcuts in Windows Explorer give you Access Denied messages that you shouldn't be getting.

What's actually happening is that those are junctions, something Windows NTFS file systems can use to link folders and provider compatibility to older programs. For example, in Windows XP, you had a c:\Documents and Settings\ folder.

In Vista, that is now located at C:\Users\, but in order for Vista to be compatible with older programs that expect the "Documents and Settings", Vista creates a junction that redirects calls to Documents and Settings to c:\Users. These junctions are more than just shortcuts.

On my Sony VAIO laptop, the people at Sony built the drive from an image located on some Y:\ drive, so all my junctions were incorrectly pointing to a non-existent Y drive.

It's easiest if you install SysInternals Junction.exe into your C:\Windows\System32 folder so you can call junction from anywhere at the command prompt.

Open command prompt by typing cmd into the Start Search box.

Type cd\ to get to the root C:\ directory

Type dir /aL /s > junction.txt to recursively view all junctions on your harddrive and output it to the junctions.txt file.

Now you can view all the junctions and ensure that all of them are pointing to the correct folders.

Open the junctions.txt file and whenever you see a junction or symbolic link (symlinkd) that is pointing to a non-existent drive, you can go to that directory at the command prompt and relink the junction.

For example, I have a junction in the C:\Users\Default directory that shows:

11/02/2006 07:02 AM <JUNCTION> Application Data [Y:\Users\Default\AppData\Roaming]

To fix this link I'll type:

c:\Users\Default>junction "Application Data" C:\Users\Default\AppData\Roaming

Note the quotes around the first argument since it has spaces in the name. The second argument doesn't have quotes because it has no spaces.

Now, if I type "dir /aL" in this folder, I'll see that this junction is now correct:

11/02/2006 07:02 AM <JUNCTION> Application Data [\??\C:\Users\Default\AppData\Roaming]

Well, I know the first part of the path looks weird ("[\??\C:\...]"), but it works. You can test out the link in windows explorer to ensure that it works. I don't know why the "\??\" shows up, but it works. If I find this is a problem I'll post a follow-up.

So if you want to repeat the above for every incorrect junction on your machine, you'll need to "cd" to the directory in question and repeat the junction command for each one.

I know some of the links show up as "symlinkd", but I didn't have any trouble deleting them and recreating them as junctions using the junction.exe tool. You can find more on Symmetric Links here. For my use, I don't really need symmetric links, so junctions will work fine. Your mileage may vary.

The only symlink I found on my system was at c:\users in the "All Users" link. I deleted and recreated it as a junction with junction.exe.

In the course of correcting my junctions, I found that I had a few areas where junctions were creating circular references. For example, if I looked at my junctions.txt file, I found that I'd have one entry that looked like this:

Directory of C:\Users\emrysx\AppData\Local\Application Data

And then the next one looked like this:

Directory of C:\Users\emrysx\AppData\Local\Application Data\Application Data

And then the next was this!

Directory of C:\Users\emrysx\AppData\Local\Application Data\Application Data\Application Data

Et cetera ad nauseam.

Now this may not be a problem due to the nature of junctions and links, but it bugged me and looked like a mess. Additionally, I couldn't see why these would be useful since I didn't have a link at the root pointing "C:\Documents and Settings\Application Data" to "C:\Users\emrysx\AppData\Roaming". Therefore it looked to me like I had messy junctions that were never going to be used.

So I deleted the "Application Data" junctions in C:\Users\emrysx\AppData\Local and C:\Users\Default\AppData\Local.

So far I haven't had any trouble with my applications or Vista as a result.