How do I FULLY install Visual Studio onto another partition?

Question

As many of you know, Visual Studio installs some of its files onto the System Drive (usually the C drive). However, I'm reserving that drive for Windows itself, so there's not much free space. As a matter of fact, I have 5.83GB free, and I have no way to free up more without uninstalling Windows. Symlinks have caught my attention this year though, and I've been using them a lot for moving large folders to other drives, for example I have my .minecraft folder on my G drive. My Windows partition (the System Drive) is kept at low storage this way so I only need to reinstall Windows if something goes horribly wrong (i.e. a driver is corrupt). So far, I've had great luck with forcing programs to install to other drives, but VS has stumped me.

Here's the problem I'm facing: I'm currently looking to install VS on my SSD (drive H) with 369GB free, however VS requires that it uses the System Drive during installation even after changing the installation directory to be on another drive. Is there any way I can, with symlinks, force VS to fully install on a different drive? If so, how do I do that?

Here's what I've tried:

• Changing the installation path to another drive
• Freeing up space on the C drive
• Looking on Google for a way to solve this

Here's what I'm tempted to try:

• Uninstall vital Windows components, such as the bloatware web browser Edge
• Install NTDev's Tiny10 as my main OS to reduce the amount of space Windows takes up
• Somehow find a version of VS online that lets you change the installation path for everything

Here's what I haven't tried:

• Using symlinks to force VS to install to another drive (Desirable)
• Installing to another device and using some remote connection software (Undesirable)

My goal for this is to install VS completely on another drive, as it has always been with everything I install (i.e. Steam, Minecraft, OBS, Discord). I also want immediate access to the program so it's only a click away from the Start menu.

Answer 1

Hi,

Did you try using winget?, That I usually do is search the package and use winget command to install in a custom path. As you I always keep drive C: for system.

e.g.

winget install Microsoft.VisualStudio.2022.Community --location "E:\custom_path\hereVisualStudio"

Let me know if this is also working for you.

Cheers,

Luis Arias

---

If the information helped address your question, please Accept the answer.