Just sharing this here in case anyone else on the web is looking for a way to run World of Warcraft off of an external hard drive. Up until Legion expansion it use to work for me. But recently Blizzard broke the game execution through external hard drive connected via USB and now states an error message on Battle.net stating Execution of World of Warcraft to en external device is no longer supported.
I didnt want to consume 48GB of my SSD to run the game and so I went looking for an alternate way to make this work. Sure enough Blizzard does not verify that the path is linked to a symbolic link and so I am able to install WoW to my C: drive, then move the game to my E: drive which is external hard drive, and then delete the C: installation of WoW and create a symbolic link to the external hard drives path to the game and it works with no error messages.
Not sure why Blizzard wanted to kill off running the game on an external hard drive, but I just cant see it eating up almost 50GB of space to run it on my SSD.
Here is the symbolic link that I used highlighted. My installation is custom to C:\World of Warcraft. Anyone with default installation would have to change the path to match their installation path and change destination path of symbolic link to make it work for them. This below was run on my Windows 7 system and you need to open up the command prompt with runas administrator.
Microsoft Windows [Version 6.1.7601]
Copyright (c) 2009 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.
C:\Windows\system32>mklink /D "c:\world of warcraft" "e:\world of warcraft"
symbolic link created for c:\world of warcraft <<===>> e:\world of warcraft
C:\Windows\system32>
