Which windows folders can be moved by symbolic links?

Question

EDIT: Reason for edit is to clear up some of the words that I used in relation to symbolic link that gave the impression I wanted to move folders and symbolic link, when I want to store the contents from c: on D: instead but still allow programs that are looking for the default windows file locations which is symbolically linked to d:

Updated Original Question: I am trying to decide which folders in windows 7 can be symbolically linked to another location lets say for example symbolic link c:\users\username\my videos to d:\users\username\my videos which is where the files are actually stored and any program that needs to use my videos won't know that the files it sees or saves really aren't on C: drive but actually are stored on D: because of me making a symbolic link.

I know I shouldn't or just can't move certain folders to a different drive, such Program Files (x86), Program Files, Programdata, Windows (I know you can't move this). I looked through the web for some listing of folders that could be symbolically linked to another location (another drive in my case). I am trying to take some of the data that would be stored on my SSD and symbolically link it to my large HDD instead. I am pretty sure My documents can be relocated via symbolic link, but will I need to do a symbolic link for each and every folder within My Documents or will a symbolic link of just My documents be suffienct.

The folders that Microsoft has stated are okay to do this will be helpful.

Since I saw some confusion about what I am doing, when I say move via symbolic link, I am referring to the following example. I want to symbolically link c:\users\username\my videos to d:\users\username\my videos. So when a program tries to save something to the original C:\users\username\my videos it will think it has done just that, when in fact it is being stored via symbolic link to d:\users\username\my videos. When it tries to retrieve it, it will still look at the c:\users\username\my videos and will actually see the files that are on d:\users\username\my videos and won't notice the difference. Hope that clears up some of the concerns in comments

Answer 1

Symlinks and junctions are resolved transparently by the OS, without programs needing to do anything special. So if the path is accessed exclusively by regular userspace software and that software does not use any special filesystem functions (such as hardlinks), it can use a symlink.

What you cannot symlink is the OS itself, i.e. the \Windows folder, or the hibernation image, because the bootloader needs to access them when the OS is not running yet – and the bootloader has very minimal filesystem support with no junctions or symlinks. (This is partly because both rely on things like "drive letters" which only the OS knows...)

Additionally, you cannot move the whole \Program Files because the Windows installer (and upgrader) creates hardlinks between files in \Windows and files in this folder. Hardlinks cannot cross filesystems, so this operation would fail and you'd have much trouble as soon as Windows Update needs to do it. The same goes for \Program Files (x86) if you have that, and quite possibly for \ProgramData as well.

(If you just want to move and symlink individual subfolders belonging to third-party programs, e.g. \Program Files\Autodesk, that should be fine.)