Wednesday, December 09, 2015

Moving c:\windows\installer to a separate drive

So, the occasionally rabid programmer had a reason to be mad indeed again. No, I am not talking about workplace politics. His parents computers stopped working.

Turns out, the c:\windows\installers folder tends to fill up over the lifetime of the OS. In the ORP's case, it managed to grow all the way to 20GB, leaving a convenient 0 Bytes free on the C: drive of his parents machines. Ouch.

So, as a follow up to the original post about setting up machines such that user directories are in an isolated partition, here's the prescription to make sure that the machines don't become dysfunctional due to too much updating, courtesy of stack overflow:

  1. Restart your PC, press F8 continuously to bring up boot menu, and choose "Command prompt with safe mode" (this is to ensure you can move the windows folder around)
  2. Once the command prompt is shown, type the command to move the folder to another drive:
    robocopy C:\Windows\Installer D:\Windows\Installer /MOVE /e
  3. Next, create a "Junction" link for the missing folder:
    mklink /J C:\Windows\Installer D:\Windows\Installer
Verified, this method actually does the trick.

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