Surface and SD Card

by Toni 10/31/2012 17:19

Okay, so this has nothing to do with Combat Robots: I pre-ordered a 32GB Microsoft Surface with Windows RT a couple of weeks ago, and it showed up (on time) last Friday. Since then I've been playing with it, and one of the first things I noticed was that less than 20GB of the 32GB SSD was available for data. Luckily, though, I had ordered a 64GB microSD card from Amazon earlier last week, when they had them on sale as the Gold Box deal of the day. I received it Monday, and put it in. Then I was scratching my head trying to figure out how to actually use the card to store stuff. Windows Libraries don't let you add removeable media as a Library source location. I tried mounting the card as a folder on the C: drive, and that didn't work either. Finally I got it [almost*] working, and figured I'd post the steps I took for posterity. Click Back after viewing an image.

Step One

Make an empty folder on the C: drive. Note that I've called it SD2 as I still had the SD card mounted as C:\SD from my original efforts. On my SD card I have already made folders for Documents, Music, Pictures, and Videos.

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Step Two

We're going to make symbolic links within C:\SD2 to each of the folders; specifically we're going to make Directory Junction points - I tried hard links and directory symbolic links, and they didn't work. Use an Administrator command prompt to run these lines:

mklink /j c:\sd2\d d:\documents
mklink /j c:\sd2\m d:\music
mklink /j c:\sd2\p d:\pictures
mklink /j c:\sd2\v d:\videos

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Step Three

Having run the above commands, check that you have four directories under C:\SD2.

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Step Four

Open Control Panel, and select Indexing Options. Choose Modify, and check C:\SD2 as an indexed location. Hit OK and Close, and exit Control Panel.

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Step Five

In File Explorer, click the Documents Library, and on the ribbon click Properties. Click Add, and select the C:\SD2\d folder. I set mine as the default Save Location so any new documents will be saved to the SD card by default. Repeat this process with the other libraries, adding C:\CD2\m to Music, C:\SD2\p to Pictures, and finally C:\SD2\v to Videos.

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Step Six

Next step - verify that it worked! Open XBox Videos from the Start screen, and go to My Videos - you should see whatever content is in D:\videos displayed.

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Step Seven

Do the same thing with XBox Music - go to My Music, and you should see the content of the Music folder on the SD card.

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Step Eight

Finally, open Pictures from the Start screen, and go in to Pictures Library.

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Step Nine

Ta-daa! The contents of D:\Pictures show up! Now, about that asterisk from above: you'll note that there is no content in the Camera Roll folder. I did actually have a couple of pictures in there, but they don't show up, even when you go into the folder. If you have a video clip you took with the camera in that folder, it does show up, which is weird. Note too, that I renamed an automatically-created Camera Roll folder to Camera Roll2 and it shows up fine. Curiouser and curioser.

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Still, it's 95% functional, so I'll go with it. Hope this helps other people trying to see SD card content in XBox Video, XBox Music, and Pictures!