How to download W8 upgrade to a different drive letter?

[floepie]

This is a bit odd. I just want to download the W8 pro upgrade from MS. However, the initial upgrade utility app won't allow the upgrade/ISO to download to my C drive because of less than 5 GB of free space. However, I have a ton of free space on other drives and partitions.

How the heck can I point the upgrade utility to download the upgrade itself to somewhere besides the C drive on my system??

 

[The_Prophecy]

Not sure that that's an option. Move some data over to a different drive temporarily so you can begin the download. Move it back when complete.

 

[floepie]

Thanks, but as you probably suspect, I don't have any data on the C drive, hence the other drives and partitions.

Am I asking for trouble if add a symlink at the root of the C drive, and would that even make the C drive appear bigger?

 

[The_Prophecy]

You have no data on your C drive yet you're currently at less than 5GB of free space? How big is this volume? You can always move an installed application over to another drive temporarily so that you are able to download the iso file (for instance, move C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office over to D:, download the iso, then move the Microsoft Office folder back)

 

[floepie]

Best answer selected by floepie.

 

[floepie]

The volume is 30GB. The winsxs is huge, and yes, I have whittled it down using the well-known cmd-line method. And, I really don't have that much installed. I did go through with WinDirStat and was able to get rid of a lot unnecessary tidbits, MSI installation files, a few temp files, and several orphaned semi-data folders in the personal folders. Now, I have just enough room. I hadn't thought to move the program file folders temporarily, as it sounds a bit dangerous.

 

[The_Prophecy]

If you try to run the application of whatever you move to the alternate drive, it will stop working until you move it back. But since it shouldn't be *missing* from the C drive for much longer than the download of the iso file takes, it won't matter anyway.

If all you're doing is moving files from installed applications (don't move the entire Program Files folder itself... you would be moving way more data than is necessary), Windows only cares when you try to run that program.