How can in install VS 2008 without using ~6.5GB of space on my C drive?

Question

When I launch the VS 2008 SP1 installer it says that it needs 6,366MB, and my C drive only has 2,452MB free space. Is there a way to install it that doesn't require so much free space? I've tried downloading the ISO image and mounting that, but it still requires 5,864MB free. Am I missing any obvious command line switches?

Answer 1

Burn it to a DVD and install it from there. Also remove any development software that you don't need from Visual Studio, such as C++, VB.NET, Crystal Reports, etc.

Answer 2

Since hard drives are very cheap these days, I would suggest buying a larger hard drive and installing VS on that drive.

You should never run your OS hard drive close to max capacity, this can seriously reduce the performance of your system.

Also, you may be able to install VS but I'm quite sure it'll use alot of disk space during install (temp files) and while you actually use VS (again temp files).

Answer 3

@Nick Berardi I only have the components that I need installed (C#, VB, Web). By

Burn it to a DVD

Do you mean to slipstream the SP1 onto the default VS2008 install, uninstall 2008, then reinstall it from the slipstreamed version? Because I've tried installing the ISO version of the SP from a DVD and that didn't help.

Answer 4

@GateKiller installing a new hard drive isn't an option since this is my work PC (time-wise it would be cheaper to start from scratch on a new PC), but thanks for the suggestion.

Answer 5

Just as an update in case anyone else has this problem, I installed the .Net 3.5 SP1 update separately. Now I'm down to "only" 5045MB required.

Answer 6

You can have Visual Studio install components onto a separate hard drive from your primary but be warned, you still end up with a lot of data on your primary drive.

I tried to install VS 2008 on a machine with 2gb of hard drive space on the primary and a lot of the secondary, you still end up with about 1gb on the primary though.

Try methods to clean up your hard drive, run the Disk Cleaner tool (I found 10gb of MS error emails the other day!). Also, try removing features you wont need, MSDN is a huge install but if you're always online google is just a few clicks away, if you aren't doing VB, don't install VB (or C#, or J#, etc).

Scott Hanselman has a recent post on freeing up disk space in Vista: http://www.hanselman.com/blog/GuideToFreeingUpDiskSpaceUnderWindowsVista.aspx