VS 11 does not pay attention to install location

Question

I've download VS 11 Developer preview. I do not have sufficient disk space in my C drive, so I entered "E:\Program Files\Visual Studio 11\" as the install location and the installer continues, but after a while, my C: drive goes out of disk space and I get the following error in the log file:

(vs_professionalcore) failed: Error: 1601 ErrorMessage: Out of disk space -- Volume: 'C:'; required space: 606,561 KB; available space: 178,516 KB. Free some disk space and retry.

Note that no files gets copied to my E: drive during the installation process. What's the solution?

Answer 1

This isn't unique to VS 2011. All versions of Visual Studio (at least all the .NET flavors I have used since 2002) have strong dependencies that can only installed onto the C: drive.

These dependencies can be stuff like the .NET 4.5 and various runtime components. The IDE itself is all that can be placed on another drive.

You usually see this in the installer where it will show that after changing the drive letter still large parts of the C: drive will be used.

I decided to fire up a VM and see what the difference was between C drive install and E drive install on VS 2010 Ultimate. As you can see the difference was only ~2GB with the bulk being on the C drive still as I stated above.

Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate C Drive Full Install Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate E Drive Full Install