Moving Large Applications/Games To A Different Drive

I found a great how to article over on gHacks.net. Its a problem we all run into. You install so many apps on your c: drive that you eventually run dry of space. When that happens… everything sloooowwwwss down and becomes painful. Here’s a guide to get you out of that situation.

The move process itself is easy enough. Just move the files in Windows Explorer, or any other file manager that you may be using, to another hard drive. You can move the folder by pressing shift during the drag and drop operation (if you do not press shift you copy the files).

Most games and applications will not start anymore after they have been moved around. The solution to this is to create symbolic hard links and Windows comes with the tool to do just that. Open a command prompt as an administrator. You find the Command Prompt under Accessories in the Windows Start Menu. Right-click the command prompt and select run as administrator.

The command that we are using to create a so called directory junction is mklink. A directory junction basically tells the operating system to create a mirror in another directory that provides access to all files of the selected directory in the mirror directory again. The files and folders of the mirror directory are however actually only redirected to the destination where they are actually hosted. This essentially means that you can make the game, application or Windows believe that the files and folders are still in their right place even if they are not.

mklink /J "new folder" "folder with the files"

That’s the basic command that we will be using. The /J parameter defines the type of symbolic link that we are creating, in this case a directory junction. The new folder is the mirror folder and the folder with files the folder containing the real files.

mklink /J "C:\program files (x86)\Dragon Age\" "e:\games\Dragon Age"

This creates a directory junction so that the files and folders of e:\games\Dragon Age are accessible by the program and Windows under C:\program files (x86)\Dragon Age\ as well (where they have been initially installed to).

C:\Windows\system32>mklink /J “c:\Program Files (x86)\Dragon Age\” “c:\games\Dragon Age\”
Junction created for c:\Program Files (x86)\Dragon Age\ <<===>> c:\games\DragonAge\

The same principle can be applied to other applications or games. It is for instance possible to move some Steam games or files to another hard drive to free up space on the one Steam is installed. Mklink is available in Windows Vista and Windows 7. I’m not sure about Windows XP right now, would be nice if anyone with XP could let me know in the comments. There are programs like Junction from Sysinternals that can create junctions as well in case that is needed.