I tried making a link to e:C-movedFrom\Windows\SoftwareDistribution from c:\windows\SoftwareDistribution a /J link instead of a /D link but Win7 still doesn’t accept updates.

Does anyone have a way to get updates happening without keeping all this stuff on the C: drive? I don’t mind if automatic updates don’t happen as long as I can go through the normal manual Win7 updates processing.

In the end, I choose to boot in system repair mode and went to command prompt. I eventually found my C: drive (it was E: drive in the repair mode command prompt box) and was then able to use DOS commands to remove the remaining .dll files and the huge stack of subfolders. Once I did that, I was then able to finally get rid of winsxs folder from the windows folder using a single rm winsxs.moved command.

Anyway, If I ever have to do this again, I’ll go to repair mode command prompt right away and save myself a couple of hours of messing around.

Thanks Matt. It would probably have taken another day or so of messing around without these instructions.

i follow all the steps carefully….

allways the same error…

i reboot and get stucked after 10 secs of restarting… black screen…. no harddrive led….
i thout could be the files moving or linking….and let it work more than 4 or 5 hours….
nothing….
black screen….

3 times… same result….hours and hours….

i just want win7 on my 4gb asus eee whit a minimum of 700 mg free to work.

This should be obvious to anyone that has looked into winsxs, its structure and how files are added to it.

winsxs contains HARD LINKED files that are placed there during updates or installs.

Hard links can only work within a volume, they cannot work across volumes, which is what junctions allow you to do.

You won’t see any errors until a later program tries to create a hard link in c:windowswinsxs from outside of it and will fail with a probably obscure message.

A work around would be to restore winsxs to its original location, run the update then move it back to the other volume with the above procedure, but I think that would defeat the point of attempting the above.

There are tools around that will shrink the size of winsxs by removing all old revisions of files and replacing them with hard links to the latest version of each file but this does require that the software using that works with the latest version – it may do, but you are risking all the dll hell problems that winsxs was designed (albeit badly) to cure

Sure, it works as an interim fix if you have no other options, but it’s not for the long term.

I killed a Win2k8 server by fat-fingering the mklink and not noticing it before a reboot.

This is what I did to repair:

1) Boot from the install CD (WinServer2k8 in my case, could also use Vista disk, I imagine)

2) After selecting language, the next screen has an install button, but at the bottom is a link to repair the system. It should detect your installation, select it and click next (or load RAID/Disk controller if needed).

3) Select command prompt from the next window. When the command prompted opened, I did a “dir c:\windows\winsxs*” and saw both folders, with the winsxs pointed to “C:\window\winsxs.moved” (notice the missing s??). I did a “dir c:\windows\winsxs.moved” to verify all my files were there, then ran “rmdir /s/q c:\windows\winsxs” to get rid of it.

4) I copied the contents of winsxs.moved to d:\windows\winsxs with the following command:

xcopy c:\windows\winsxs.moved\* d:\windows\winsxs /h/i/c/k/e/y/x

That copied all 32,312 files over I had in my dir.

5) Ran “rmdir /s/q c:\windows\winsxs.moved” and “mklink /J c:\windows\winsxs d:\windows\winsxs”

6) Ran “dir c:\windows\winsxs*” showed the junction of the winsxs directory pointing to d:\windows\winsxs.

7) typed exit, then clicked the reboot button on the window.

After that, the system booted up fine, thank God!

I checked the c & d drives and the space had changed accordingly (removed about 5g from the c and added about 5g to the d).

I hope this helps someone else out there who kills their, box as I did.

Thanks Matt!!!