I am trying to install VS2008 sp1 to my work machine - it has a pathetic 10Gb C drive. The SP1 bootstrapper doesn't give the option to install items to D, only C. It needs 3Gb free and the machine only has about 700Mb.
VS allowed me to install to D originally why not the SP. The only thing I can think of that it requires system files installed in Windows etc, but I can't believe there are 3Gb worth of system files?
If you have an empty partition, you can try to create a mounted drive (i.e. map the partition to an empty folder on the C: drive) and see whether the SP1 bootstrapper will be able to use it.
When you say "10Gb C drive", do you mean it's a 10-gig disk or a partition? If the former, you should really be looking at replacing the drive - it's old, and I'd be starting to worry about how much longer it has to live.
If the latter, then assuming that the C: drive restriction can't easily be worked around, then I'd look at increasing the size of the C: partition. Depending on how full the remainder of the drive is, this can take a while. I'd also be considering spending some tens of dollars ($40 or $50, I'd guess) on a partition manager from someone such as Acronis or Paragon. Kick it off just before you finish work for the day - it may take several hours, especially if the disk's fairly full.
@Mike Woodhouse : It's a partition and a machine at a place I am contracting at, so hands are tied.
You could also download the full VS2008 SP1 ISO image from here.
Then you can either burn it to DVD or use a tool such as Virtual CD-ROM Control Panel from Microsoft to mount the ISO as another drive.
After mounting the ISO as a virtual drive, you can run the SP1 install from there.
Are you in place upgrading your current version or have you uninstalled VS 2008 Gold? By default, the installer won't let you change the directory if any existing versions of VS are installed.
To move the installation, you will need to uninstall all editions of 2008 you have installed (including any Express Editions) and then the choose installation location option should enable.
@SitWalkStand - running it from a mounted ISO @Nidonocu - vs2008 is installed on D, which is why I am surprised it insists installing on C
I vaguely recall having this happen to me when I had Office 2007 installed first before VS 2008. I don't remember what options that I had installed for Office 2007.
Update: I remember now it had to do with the fact that I had Visual Studio Tools for Office already installed. When I upgraded my computer I did a clean install of everything without problems by installing VS 2008 before installing Office 2007 and VSTO. So most likely you have to uninstall whatever is causing VS 2008 to want to go to a specific drive.
Even if you do get it to switch drives it still is going to put a lot of stuff on the system drive.
Worth a read:
http://blogs.msdn.com/heaths/archive/2008/07/24/why-windows-installer-may-require-so-much-disk-space.aspx
I was faced with the same problem, and ended up moving my Outlook archive.pst and the windows.edb (the new live search index file) over to D: to make room instead of trying to cram a square peg into a round hole with SP1 splitting drives. A huge help in this regard is WinDirStat, which scans a drive of your choice and identifies the size of every folder and file so that you can reveal some random large entities and move them if you can.
I also ran into the same problem on a server that only has 20gb on the C: drive. I found a way to free up enough space to get the job done by reassigned the system's virtual memory allocation to use D: drive instead of C:. This freed up about 4gb in my case.
On Windows XP the place to set this is in My Computer system properties, Advanced tab, Performance Options: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/308417
I had the same problem with VS2008 installed on a C: drive that was only 12Gb in size.
I uninstalled VS2008 completely by following the manual steps in this page, and then by using the auto-uninstaller:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/vstudio/bb968856.aspx
I then rebooted the machine.
I then re-installed VS2008 on the E: drive.
I then rebooted the machine.
I was then able to install SP1 - as now it did not need quite as much space on C: drive.