Lets suppose that there are:
- a folder and
- a junction point or a symlink to that folder
When the original folder is moved to a new location, both the junction point and the symlink fail (point to an orphaned location). The failure of the link is not the case when a hard link to a file is created. Any hard link to a file can be moved to other folders and it will still point to the same physical file on the hard drive.
Is there a way to create a 'link' to a folder, so that when the folder is moved, the link 'tracks' the location of that folder and still works after the move operation?
If not, why is this not possible.
You can use junction.exe from the SysInternals suite to create hard links to directories in XP.
Creating hardlinks to files can be done natively, with the fsutils (command line) utility.
However, what you're asking for doesn't exist in NTFS. I found a decent rundown of the NTFS implementations of Hard Links, Junction Points, and Soft Links, but as far as what you're asking about, junction points are the directory/folder version of file hard links under NTFS. And, unlike hard links, they will not update if their target is moved or removed. As to why this is the case, because that's the way Microsoft chose to implement junction points in their file system.
Per Michael Hampton's comment, I did a little Googling about directory hard links, and while I couldn't find anything immediately from Microsoft as it relates to true hard links creating loops in the directory structure, I did find something from Unix and Linux .SE with a good explanation of the problem, and the fundamentals are the same, so it might be worth a read.