Windows 10, Origin, and Network Drives

[scud133]

These steps solved it for me too!

Now I can have my origin games stored on a big network share drive to keep my local machine fast and lean. Thanks!

[VoodaGod]

thank you, worked perfectly!

[23silver23]

This solved it for me as well, pity it took so much hassle to do what other game clients do natively

[pigosso]

I'm pretty sure that services and SYSTEM are perfectly able to read shares.

If any, my educated guess after reading the logs is that when it uses CreateDirectoryAllAccess (I suppose to set the Administrators group as the owner of the new folder) the "host" PC doesn't agree with it.

When you force it disabled, Origin doesn't care for all that pesky added layer of security, and it simply runs the plain installation script.

I didn't need any symlink then btw.

You only have to whitelist the network drive from having executables run, and it works smooth as silk then.

[WizPip]

I'm going to go ahead and assume that the Origin client has changed quite a lot since I posted my original issue, FOUR YEARS ago...

[RapidSilent]

Not at all. I've tried every solution here and on the web and still cant get it to install on a mapped networked drive. Steam doesn't have a problem. But hey this is origin were talking about.

[supamonkey2000]

For anyone here in 2020, it still works. EA still broken af, as usual.

[jakerfv]

Hello. Has anyone figured out to configure this for the Origin-DRM Steam releases? Newer EA games that are designed to launch through Origin (after launching through steam) have the same issue as before when launching from a NAS. I've tried following the guide in this thread and while it works for games bought through Origin, it doesn't seem to work for games bought on Steam that require the Origin client and DRM to play.

[sUp3r_b0wLz]

IIIMaddinIII's instructions (Solved: Re: Windows 10, Origin, and Network Drives - Page 2 - Answer HQ (ea.com)) still work perfectly for me. I wish it could startup unattended and update games, but this works fine for now. 

Here's a powershell snippet that does this automatically. If you paste this into an admin powershell session and reboot it should work.

# Step 1: Set the EnableLinkedConnections registry key
$Path="HKLM:\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\System"
$Name="EnableLinkedConnections"
$Value=1
$ValueType="DWord"

# If the registry key doesn't exist, create It
IF(!(Test-Path $Path))
{
  New-Item -Path $Path -Force | Out-Null
}
# Set the value of the registry key
New-ItemProperty -Path $Path -Name $Name -Value $Value -PropertyType $PropertyType -Force | Out-Null


# Step 2: Set the Origin Client Service StartupType to disabled (If it exists)
$OriginServiceName="Origin Client Service"
$service = Get-Service -Name $OriginServiceName -ErrorAction SilentlyContinue

if ($service.Length -gt 0) {
    Set-Service -Name $OriginServiceName -StartupType Disabled
} else {
    Write "$($OriginServiceName) Is not installed. Install Origin and try again"
}

[AnqerManagement]

Seriously! This problem of Origin not being able to install games to a mapped network drive has existed since AT LEAST 2015, and has not been fixed yet?!