Moving Visual Studio installation to another drive

Question

_{Tuesday, August 2, 2016 5:10 AM | 2 votes}

Hi,

  I would like to move my current Visual Studio installation to another drive.  What steps do I need to take to achieve this?

-Bob

All replies (6)

_{Tuesday, August 2, 2016 8:08 AM ✅Answered | 2 votes}

Hi Bob12543,

Run the installer from command line with argument:

vs_community.exe /CustomInstallPath InstallationDirectory

For this example I used Visual Studio Community version. 

When you execute this command you need to be clear that this will not change location for all the files, this will install only of those which can be installed onto different location. There is some of shared components which will be installed into shared repositories on drive C:.

Hope this was helpful for you...

Best regards!

(If this was helpful for you, vote for it and propose it as an answer)

_{Wednesday, August 3, 2016 4:11 AM ✅Answered | 1 vote}

I am not asking about installation.  I am asking whether there is a way I can move the installed instance to another drive.

-Bob.

The most  reliable way is to remove the current installation completely and re-install to the new directory in the  manner described above. Indeed I would force the removal of all components.

vs_enterprise.exe /uninstall /force

_{Wednesday, August 3, 2016 3:08 AM}

Hi Bob,

Thank you for your post.

As Almir said, you could select a different installation directory.

But it's very likely that some updates or extensions could not handle it correctly if VS is not installed in the default directory.

Besides, you could take a look at the following link, it's about how to install Visual Studio 2015 on a different drive:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/32029751/how-to-install-visual-studio-2015-on-a-different-drive

Best Regards,

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_{Wednesday, August 3, 2016 3:58 AM | 1 vote}

I am not asking about installation.  I am asking whether there is a way I can move the installed instance to another drive.

-Bob.

_{Sunday, June 30, 2019 11:44 PM | 2 votes}

I agree Bob there should be a way to move any Visual Studio, I am sure it would save Microsoft bandwidth as well as us, it's a huge file and when you've been doing some work it gets bigger fast.

I tried the installing to another drive and yes the install eventually failed, I have tried other directories and they eventually failed as well.

Its brutal having to re-download every time the system crashes, I have had to reinstall every 2 months, I don't know whats happening in development with windows but do to the constant changes it seems that a lot of dll's are no longer compatible with having the system settings set to future and not compatibility.

It would sure be nice sense VS now has a self healing mode if we could move VS and log in and not get the error message of, your license has expired, when it clearly has not.

If VS is really self healing, it should be able to rebuild itself, cognitive should be able to handle fixing a few dll's, it would be more cost effective, save energy etc. 

Just as a pointer all the VSIX files should be stored in a VSIX folder that can be moved as well, to save developers time on rebuilding the whole download.

I think there should be away, it takes so much time to put it all together not to be able to move it.

_{Thursday, August 22, 2019 8:48 AM | 1 vote}

My personal solution is virtualization. Using hyper-v (or vmware) the data is in the disk you prefer. Nowdays with SSD for the main OS, Visual Studio is biting too much space.

This is an old problem, and they did pretty nothing to solve it.