How to install Visual Studio 2015 on a different drive

Question

I m trying to figure out how to install Visual Studio Community 2015 on another drive besides my C   drive  Every time I open the installer of VS it shows the save location but won t let me change it     I m wanting to change the download destination to my D   drive  If there is a work around could someone give me a hand  I ve searched for about a few hours now  and I can t find anything relating to my issue

User · Answer

I use Xamarin with Visual Studio  and I prefer to move only some large android to another directory with copy these folders to destination before create hardlinks    mklink  J  C  Users yourUser  android   E  yourFolder  android   mklink  J  C  Program Files  x86  Android   E  yourFolder Android

User · Answer

I found these two links which might help you    https   www reddit com r csharp comments 2agecc why must visual studio be installed on my system  http   www placona co uk 1196 dotnet installing-visual-studio-on-a-different-drive    Basically  at least a portion needs to be installed on a system drive  I m not sure if your D   corresponds to some external drive or an actual system drive but the symlink solution might help   Good luck

User · Answer

Use VirtualBox  Create a machine on the drive you wish  Enable guest aditions and activate seamless mode   Benefits     The ENTIRE installation is on the second drive  will work even with a 32gb ssd   This is the main selling point  considering that Visual studio with it s additional features exceeds 30gb  If you have the GB to spare this solution is NOT the best for you  Uninstalling or backing up is a breeze  Just delete or move the image file  No system file conflicts and dirty registry in case of a corrupted installation    Drawbacks     You need a LOT of ram  I use 4GB  out of 8  and 2  out of 6  cores to run comfortably  Even so it is still slower than a normal installation  Will not work for applications with extensive 3d graphics  If you want to work with forms it s fine but if you want to create a 3d game for android using say xamarin then forget it  Testing the program takes several seconds to compile  minutes for android apps   This may not seem much but during development these seconds do add up     This is the solution i am using and am very happy with it but i am not your average professional programmer  I just create small windows form applications like file uploaders  chat apps etc  Try it out  It will take some time to setup but this experimentation isn t risky

User · Answer

After trying to manually uninstall  and then downloading another copy of the VS 2015 community installer for use with the force uninstall command line argument  Original answer by Michael Schuchardt   I was still unable to modify the install directory   After testing further  I found that Unity  which integrates with Visual Studio as of Unity 5 2  also had to be removed  At this point Visual Studio Uninstaller  link to latest release on Github  can be used for the final removal of remaining any remaining components   You will now be able to run the Visual Studio Installer and select a directory or  alternatively  run the install from command line using the   CustomInstallPath      argument

User · Answer

Uninstall the plugins first  And then try this  This uninstaller worked like a charm  I didn t even uninstall 2015 myself  it did everything on its own

User · Answer

Run installer in command line  Admin  with argument   vs community ENU exe  uninstall  force  Then   vs community ENU  CustomInstallPath E  VisualStudio2015

User · Answer

Run the installer from command line with argument  CustomInstallPath InstallationDirectory  See more command-line parameters and other installation information   Note  this won t change location of all files  but only of those which can be  by design  installed onto different location  Be warned that there is many shared components which will be installed into shared repositories on drive C  without any possibility to change their path  unless you do some hacking using mklink  j  directory junction  i e  hard link for folder    but it is questionable whether it is worth it  because any Visual Studio updates will break those hard links  This is confirmed by people who tried that  although on Visual Studio 2012      Update  per recent comment  uninstallation of Visual Studio might be required before the above applies  Uninstallation command is like this  vs community ENU exe  uninstall  force

User · Answer

Anyone tried this approach   Doing a  dir  s vs ultimate exe from the root prompt will find it  Mine was in   lt C  ProgramData Package Cache   guid   gt    Once I navigated there and ran vs community ENU exe  uninstall  force it uninstalled all the Visual Studio assets I believe   Got the advice from this post

[visual-studio-2015] How to install Visual Studio 2015 on a different drive

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