Visual Studio Community 2017 Installation Path

Question

I am trying to install Visual Studio Community 2017 on a different drive.

My C:-drive is a pretty small SSD with barely free space. So I tried to install VSC17 on me E:-drive without success.

In fact: The VisualStudioExecutables were on my E-drive but all the Subcomponents (Multiplatform Emulators and so on..) were installed on my C:-drive. The installer appearently knew that already since it already said to have not enough space for all components.

I also tried it via commandline

vs_Community /finalizeInstall --installPath "E:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio\2017\Community"

after that installer started with E: but still installed the subcomponents on C:

Answer 1

Adding to the answer from Haris Ahmed. Say you want the new installation folder to be D:\MSVS2017 (change to your liking).

mklink /J "C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio\2017\Enterprise" "D:\MSVS2017\2017\Enterprise"

mklink /J "C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio\Installer" "D:\MSVS2017\Installer"

mklink /J "C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio\Shared" "D:\MSVS2017\Shared"

mklink /J "C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft SDKs" "D:\MSVS2017\Microsoft SDKs"

mklink /J "C:\Microsoft\AndroidNDK64" "D:\MSVS2017\Microsoft\AndroidNDK64"

You can also move these folders after installation. Just cut and past them to where you want them and then use the mklink command accordingly.

There are still about 20GB of stuff unaccounted for that still go into the C: drive. If I find more I will edit this post.

edit: just found another 4 gigs mklink /J "C:\Program Files (x86)\Android\android-sdk" "D:\MSVS2017\Android\android-sdk"

Answer 2

Use symbolic link to direct the path to another location, but the main issue is knowing the directories of the components you are installing. to create symbolic link: 1- Run CMD as admin type the following mklink /d "link" "target"