Often servers or workstations will run low of disk space on the system partition. This is especially true I’ve found with older Dell servers that shipped with a 12GB system partition.
The c:\windows\installer directory often occupies several gigabytes of storage.
While Windows does not provide a mechanism to re-point this directory via the registry, you can use NTFS junctions/reparse points to re-point the directory to a different local volume. Re-pointing to UNC paths is not supported.
- Obtain junction.exe from http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb896768.aspx
I found it handy to add the executable to c:\windows\system32 for easy access
- Create the destination Installer folder on the new volume (ie: D:\Installer)
- Move all content from c:\windows\installer to your new directory
- Make sure to close any explorer windows with these folders opened. Junction.exe requires that there are no open file handles to these directories
- Create the junction
junction.exe c:\windows\installer d:\installer
