Why does matlabroot return a UNC path instead of using the mapped drive letter in Windows 10?

I have MATLAB installed on a network drive under Windows 10. Why does matlabroot return the UNC path rather than using the mapped drive letter?

Answer 1

[MathWorks Support Team]

This is a known issue with using MATLAB on Windows 10 caused by a change in the operating system API compared to previous versions of Windows. It affects all releases prior to and including R2015a.

To make matlabroot return a drive letter path on Windows 10, start MATLAB using the MATLAB.exe program in the folder, %MATLABROOT%\bin\win64, where %MATLABROOT% is the folder where MATLAB is installed.

For example, if you installed MATLAB R2015a to a mapped network drive B:\, from either Windows Explorer or the command line, run:

B:\MATLAB\R2015a\bin\win64\MATLAB.exe

However, when using this workaround, certain command line options will not be processed (including, but not limited to, -sd and -log). In addition, on Windows 32-bit platforms, MATLAB will not use Memory Shielding, and thus can be somewhat more likely to run out of memory when working with large data sets.