Recover Visual Studio installation from external hard disk - visual-studio

I recently had to replace my hard disk on my laptop, which contained my Visual Studio installation. When the new hard disk was added, unfortunately the person involved in setup has put Windows 8.1 on an internal SSD (I am using Dell XPS) and made this the system drive -- since this is ~30GB only, re-installing Visual Studio is not an option it seems, as my understanding is that even if the install path is changed to the new hard drive, VS will still need significant space on the system drive (I have ~6GB left).
My old hard drive is being used as an external drive, and it seems all the data is fine, and can see that the VC compilers work fine via the command line. My question is, if there is a method by which I can get the Visual Studio installation up and running on my old hard drive(external), as all the components needed are present -- is there a config file or some such that I could use, and manually enter the registry information to make it work? Is there anything else I could do?

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How do I install Visual Studio Completely in D drive?

I need to install Visual Studio 2022 for Unity. I specified the installation location in my D drive
but C drive's space runs low. Thus, I could not install it. I don't know what components get installed. I've looked for many methods, and mklink caught my eye but not confident about it. If there was any other way to, I would be glad to hear it.
No, unfortunately most of Visual Studio still gets installed on the main drive. Regarding to this forum thread 75% of VS gets installed on the main drive and just 25% on the chosen drive.
So you have no choice but to make space on your c drive.

Why does Visual Studio insist on installing partial components on a system drive despite despite another drive being specified for installation?

This is primarily a question focused on recent tooling I've been trying to get an installer to place components on a separate drive, but it's notably been an issue a few times in the past, and as I've not been the only person to
encounter this particular type of issue, I'm trying to keep this a bit open on the general case for this situation.
So, with that caveat in consideration, I noticed this recently while trying to repair a Visual Studio installation, and found that it was trying to install components to the "System drive", despite having an installation directory that explicitly isn't on the system drive, which is a little annoying given that I don't have a lot of space on that drive left before I run out of space.
While I am interested in a solution for Visual Studio in this case, I was wondering what the root cause of having configurable software requiring installation to bleed over into unrelated systems drives regardless of the preference of installation location - is this a result of system commands being expected to be on the same drive as the shared tool itself, and is there a way to develop software to reduce the footprint of this where possible relatively generally?
For Visual Studio(2017, 2019) the installation locations can be changed in Visual Studio Installer > VS > Modify > Installation locations, the first time you install Visual Studio, but after you finish installing VS, the locations cannot be changed. And generally, there are three locations can be changed, they are
1). Visual Studio IDE
2). Download cache
3). Shared components, tools, and SDKs
Though these locations can be changed, some files will still be installed in C Drive.
What I think:
This is by design, or can be considered as some necessary files need to be installed in C drive to let them be “closer” to the system(or system files). Perhaps for security reasons, for sharing libraries(dlls), for registering into Windows…
I think this is not a specific condition for VS, other applications may also have some files installed to C drive.
While I am interested in a solution for Visual Studio in this case.
I’m afraid there is no solution in this case, I mean, at least, from some VS settings/options, change those files’ locations or move them from C Drive to another drive is not possible, or will cause error.
I was wondering what the root cause of having configurable software requiring to bleed over into unrelated systems drives regardless of the preference of installation location.
Perhaps, the “unrelated” is not unrelated. The better way to confirm this, I think you can ask Visual Studio Product Team, they are active on Microsoft Developer Community.

Deinstall Xamarin completely

I have a pc with a C:/ drive that can only handle 100GB. For school I needed to download Xamarin for Visual Studio 2015 for a hackaton (so I only needed it 1 day). It took a while to get 20GB of free space in my C:/ drive (because of course, it wouldn't just download on my D:/ or an external drive), after the installation, less than 1 GB remained. But I still needed to do an update for Xamarin... after deinstalling some Adobe programs, I still didn't get enough memory for that update, so I gave up and ended up pair programming.
Now, after the hackaton, I wanted to remove Xamarin as quickly as possible. I looked up what I had to remove and I did, now only 6,3GB free space remains. Meaning that more than 15GB is still taken by something.
I looked up several sites, I even tried to find hidden files in my regedit, but I didn't succeed in getting my space back. It seems that no one really wants to get rid of Xamarin alone.
The problem is that I still need Visual Studio 15 for ASP.NET for school, so I would rather not deinstall my visual Studio completely as it takes a while to completely install it again.
Has anyone an idea what files I can remove that is installed together with Xamarin, or what I can try to get my C:/ drive to breathe again?

Recover Visual Studio 2010 macros from a previous install?

I'll keep it short and simple. I had a OCZ Vertex 100Gb SSD that I had my operating system and programming tools aka VS2010. Anyway the drive failed and Windows went kaput, however I am able to recover certain folders including all those related to VS2010.
My question is where will the old macros be stored and how if possible do I copy them to my new VS2010 install on my new O/S ? I don't want to have to re-program all my macros again.
By default Visual Studio 2010 stores user recorded macros in "%userprofile%\Documents\Visual Studio 2010\Projects\VSMacros80", you can just copy that folder to the new drive to get them on the new install (you may have to load them manually).

Visual Studio 2005 Professional Edition - Error 1311, source file not found (Yet it exists!)

I've gotten sick of having multiple Visual Studio Express Editions installed, so I decided to get the Visual Studio 2005 Professional Edition... Luckily I haven't yet bought it.
I downloaded the VS2005 Pro Trial from microsoft's website (trust me, this was a hard to find link). I am encountering an error, however:
Error 1311.Source file not found: z:\vs\_186_RTL_x86_enu_CRT_Objs.cab. Verify that the file exists and that you can access it.
[Retry] [Cancel]
I checked, double-checked, and triple-checked that the file DOES exist.
What I did was download the 2800MB .img file from microsoft's website, used microsoft's VCdControl program to mount it at mount point Z:. It does exist, and all the other files copied from the virtual disk just fine. What is causing this?
P.S.: If you're wondering why I am going through the trouble of using VS2005, it's because I'm stuck using windows on a 300MHz processor / 256MB ram system, running windows 2000 pro. 2005 is the last VS product year that works. Anything newer has either too high requirements, or does not support Windows 2000 any longer.
Thank you so much for the help, in advance.
(Erm, my computer just froze so it's now rebooting. Hopefully it continue where it left off... The screen, keyboard and everything locked me out entirely. Maybe the graphics card got nullified, there was blue lines at the top of the screen. Power button, ftw!)
UPDATE: Due to having to hard reboot, I had to re-start the VS2005 installation. It appears to be installing the Visual Studio 2005 component from scratch again, so it may or may not work this time. If anyone happens to know what caused the original error, it would be much appreciated if you'd post. Thank you! :)
UPDATE 2: Failed, again. Same error as above, missing that darned cab file. It's there, I can see it! >.<
UPDATE 3: I copied the "missing" cab file onto my hard drive from the virtual cd, and tried to extract it myself using a utility called "cabextract". It also claims the file cannot be found, yet it is clearly right there!
UPDATE 4: It appears more than one of my cab files are corrupt. I'm md5sum-ing all the files and matching them up with shsmith's md5sum list to determine how corrupt it is. :(
Are you able to copy that file to your local drive? Maybe there is an error reading the contents rather than finding the file.
Copy the VS folder from the image to your local drive and install from there.
There are a number of pages that discuss similar issues:
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&newwindow=1&safe=off&q=Error+1311+visual+studio+2005&btnG=Search&aq=f&aqi=&aql=&oq=
Do you have all the service packs and windows updates installed? I have a windows 2000 VM and ran the default install of VS2005 and it completed without any problem. But I had just installed IE6 and then all the available windows updates (had to download IE6 to get WU working).
What is the MD5 of your copy of that cab? Maybe your image is corrupt. Here is the MD5 of my copy:
9562459319ee43c046e2f4b0a65d815b *_186_RTL_x86_enu_CRT_Objs.cab

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