Why am I getting an "invalid path error" when trying to install VS on a thumb drive?

Question

Why am I getting an "invalid path error" when trying to install VS on a thumb drive?

Dan Bromberg 51

I am trying to install Visual Studio Community on a 128 GB thumb drive and am receiving the error highlighted in yellow, as shown in the attachment.

VSinstall-err.JPG

How can I avoid this error?
Thanks,
Dan

1 answer

Your answer

Answer 1

Tianyu Sun-MSFT 34,441 Microsoft External Staff

Hi Dan,

It’s not possible, or you can understand as, Visual Studio is not designed to install on a thumb drive.

Some files and dependencies are needed to be installed on system drive, and a removable drive doesn’t support.

Do you consider offline installing VS? A layout is needed when trying to install VS offline, the layout can be stored on a thumb drive. When you move the layout to another machine by using a thumb drive, you can install the VS there by using this offline layout(if you are interested, more details here: Use the command line to create a local layout).

Let me know if you have any further concerns.

Best regards,

Tianyu

If the answer is the right solution, please click "Accept Answer" and kindly upvote it. If you have extra questions about this answer, please click "Comment".

Note: Please follow the steps in our documentation to enable e-mail notifications if you want to receive the related email notification for this thread.

Dan Bromberg 51 Reputation points

2025-03-31T18:14:37.45+00:00
Hi Tianyu,

I'm presently very satisfied with VSC (Visual Studio Code for my Python coding), but from what I've read, VSC doesn't have the robust support for Visual Basic that VS (Visual Studio) appears to have. So I was looking for an IDE for VB without eating up 7 GB (or more?) of my SSD which is why I was hoping to run VS from a thumb drive. From your reply, I apparently can't do that (though DeepSeek said otherwise*), but if you have another suggestion, I'd appreciate it.

Dan

https://chat.deepseek.com/a/chat/s/e6876263-3be7-4926-9b5c-7c22aa48e839
Tianyu Sun-MSFT 34,441 Reputation points Microsoft External Staff

2025-04-01T03:40:53.7+00:00

Hi Dan,

It’s true that installing Visual Studio takes more space(GB).

If you only consider saving space, then you may get more issues in the future. For example, you know, the speed of the SSD(read and write) is not the same to the thumb drive. SSD is faster, if installing VS into a thumb drive, compiling, debugging, and responding will delay.

You may also get problems about failing to uninstall VS if some files are missing or corrupted in SSD <-> thumb drive.

If some configurations wrongly set, VS may fail to start.

Also, for long-term usage, apparently, we should install tools in SSD, instead of installing it in thumb drive.

If you just want to use VS shortly, uninstalling it later should be acceptable.

Think differently, from another point, VS IDE is powerful enough, why we still use VS Code? Yes, more flexibility, size smaller, but with some features missing.

So, is there 1% possibility that we can install the Visual Studio into the thumb drive? I guess so, by using some methods, let VS recognize that the thumb drive is not a thumb drive. About the methods, you may need to use some Windows OS tools, like mklink(mklink /d "C:\XXXXX" "G:\XXXXX\"). I suggest you double confirm with Windows Team before you decide to use this tool to create a directory symbolic link.

Deploying a VM and installing VS on it then use it, should be another workaround.

BTW, Visual Studio cannot be fully installed on another drive. Some files are needed to be installed on C(system) drive. See this ticket: Install everything of VS on another drive which I reported before for more details.

Kind regards,

Tianyu
Dan Bromberg 51 Reputation points

2025-04-01T14:14:07.7633333+00:00

Hi Tianyu,

Once again, I appreciate your reply and suggested options.

I am more than willing to sacrifice the performance of running VS from a thumb drive instead of the traditional way of running it from my SSD. I am looking for a way to learn VB and am not in a production environment so the savings in time is of no value to me. I've never used the mklink command and have limited dealings using the Windows Sandbox, so the suggestions you made excite me to try them and follow up on the challenges they will undoubtedly present to me. Making my way through such a project is always the best way to learn.

I'm sure MS has their reasons for not making VS portable, and you've made it clear that I should not pursue the thumb drive approach, so thank you for encouraging me not to pursue that route.

With much appreciation for your guidance,
Dan
Tianyu Sun-MSFT 34,441 Reputation points Microsoft External Staff

2025-04-03T01:19:10.7966667+00:00

You are welcome Dan :)

If there is anything that I can help here, don't hesitate to let me know.

Regards,

Tianyu

Share via

Why am I getting an "invalid path error" when trying to install VS on a thumb drive?

1 answer

Your answer