Symlinking not working with LL3.0

[m654321]

This morning, within LL3.0,  I have twice tried unsuccessfully to symlink '/home' (sda2 on physical drive1) to '/mnt/DATA', the latter occupying  a single ntfs partition (sdb1) on physical drive2.  When I reboot the PC, the folders in /home/mike appear white, with a cross on each one.  On examining the contents of sdb1, I find no trace of the folders I created there.

Symlinking is something I've done routinely in the past with the LL2 series without a hitch.  Is 'utf8' still supported in LL3.0 or is this now discontinued?  Would be grateful for help with this.

Thanks for any help
Mike