Installing software to SD Card?

I have a Acer A110, 8GB SSD with a 8GB SD Card. It's currently running Windows 7, which is using almost 6GB of the SSD. I'm installing all the programs to the SD Card. So far no problems at all, running Office 2007 etc. from the SD card whithout any issues. It's actually quite fast.

I now want to install MS Visual Studio 2008 to the SD card, but it's not allowing me to. In the setup you can choose the installation path, but if you choose the SD card, it tells you that installations to removable devices are not allowed or recommended. Anyone know of a way to get around this?

 

Some software does the check where actually your installer copies files to. Some software also does not allow to be installed to SD card. Apparently Visual Studio is one of the programs. I think that if you want to modify this you probably need to use more complicated method like decompiling installer software and modyfing installation path or the way installer perform checks - I do not think it's easy thing to do...

 

Just mount your sd card in an empty folder on your c drive via administrative tools disk manager.

 

This was actually quite easy to do. I found a program called Junction. You basically use it to "redirect" files to a different folder. I created folders "c:\program files\visual studio 2008" and "d:\programs\visual studio 2008" (my SD Card). I then junction'd the first to redirect to the 2nd folder.

So if I browse to folder c:\program files\visual studio 2008\, it shows all the files and folders there, but it's actually not installed there, but on my SD Card. Almost like a shortcut, but Windows still reads it as a normal folder. Visual Studio installed perfectly and it's actually running very fast.

 

Good to know. I was expecting that some software may be able to do that but I was thinking more towards installer modification then "cheating" on a system