I use my own blog once in a while to remind myself how to do a specific task, and sometimes I forget to document every step along the way.
I did my basic steps of using psexec with admin creds and elevated permissions, and came across the two useual problems I forgot to mention in my previous posts!
The first one being; Access Denied – unable to create directory.
That’s funny considering I have full admin permissions, this is another one of those erroneous error messages. This one was really due to junctions aka linked files in linux.
After hurdling that issue using the switches /d /s /y /h /i /z I discovered the next erroneous error message of insufficient memory. Gosh Darn it xcopy can you do anything right? Like usual google to the rescue and you sure enough discover that this event happens due the limit of 256 characters on the NTFS file format most windows use (unless you are on Win 8.1 or above and use the new file table, but that’s a blog post for another day.) So the total directory path turns out to be longer than NTFS allows and cause this “insufficient memory” error. As you can imagine google and others blogs have pointed me to Robocopy!.
Robocopy what a nice command tool! Anyway at first I attempt normal robocopy without switchs, well that didn’t work, then I saw the /MIR, MASSIVE CAUTION!
Robocopy by default attempts to copy junction links, and by doing so (I’m not sure exactly how it attempts to accomplish this) it will spiral into the junction creating folder parents of children deeply into itself leaving with a structer similar to:
c:\user\username\Application Data\Application Data\Application Data”
to the point where it gets so deep it managed to crash saying it can’t read the file and attempting to break out of it using ctrl+c, won’t really work.
If you did run Robocopy with the /MIR on a users profile or any parent directory with junction folders, you’ll have to manually clean up the mess left behind. When you attempt to deleted the parent folder it will prompt an error stating the file is too large for the file system it resides on or something similar. These events are full of erroneous error messages. But go as far into the folder as you can then cut the folder where you end and paste it all the way into its parent folder shrinking the complete path name allowing you to work with the deeper child directories, after a couple cut n paste it should be short enough for you to delete the folders and all files.
The proper way is to use “Robocopy /MIR /XJ SourceDir TargetDir”. This way junctions will be skipped. Hope this helps someone else experiencing troubles with Xcopy and Robocopy.
Jan 2018 Update
I remember this. 🙂 2014 was a good year.