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Installing Visual Studio to an External hard Drive with the Internal Hard drive having limited Space

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Saturday, January 13, 2018 6:02 PM

I do not have any space on my computer and the external ,hard drive is my only outlet!

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Monday, January 15, 2018 3:25 AM | 2 votes

Hi Innovator775,

Welcome to MSDN forum.

You can install visual studio to another hard Drive, but about 75% of the files get installed to System folder by design and the other 25% gets installed to custom install path.

In the feedback , José Antonio das Neves Neto provide a suggestion to prevent visual studio from being installed to system drive:

Create a SymLink form the folder where VS “wants” to be installed, to the folder where you want to install it. This way, you “trick” the installer to think it’s being installed on the system drive, but is is in reality installing it to the drive you defined on your symlink.

Think of it as a shortcut to a folder deeply nested within your file system. You can have it sitting on your desktop, but when you actually open it, you will find that the path to it is something like <letter>\my\deeply\nested\directory*.*

So in order to do that, all you will need to do is the following:

  1. Open command line as an administrator (you can type “cmd” and right click on it to run as admin)
  2. Enter mklink /J “C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 11.0” “E:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 11.0”   
    1. Where the J flag indicates you’re creating a directory junction (see more here)
    2. The first path is where VS is trying to install itself
    3. The second path is where you want it to be installed
  3. Carry on and let it install

You will now notice the whole of it (except for things it adds to the registry) will have been installed on your preferred drive.

Best regards,

Joyce

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Wednesday, September 26, 2018 10:13 PM

Create a SymLink form the folder where VS “wants” to be installed, to the folder where you *want to install it. *

Sorry for replying to old topic but i have a question about your answer.

I have almost same situation. I have Windows tablet with only about 4 gigs of free space on C:\ But i have 64 gigs MicroSD formatted in exFAT (E drive in system). And i heard exFAT doesn't support SymLinks, but you can make a link from NTFS to exFAT.

So the question is: will it work? Can i make a SymLink from C:\Program Files (for example) to E:\Programs ?