Installing LabVIEW on a drive of your choice

[MogaRaghu]

Those with 128GB size SSD for the C:Drive, where Windows is installed, soon realize they made a mistake. Very soon you are facing a " Low disk Space " warning and of course you have two options : A - Increase the size of C Drive . B - Unload application to other drives. 

For some specific reasons I chose option B and moved my LabVIEW installation to D Drive using the registry key modification work around. All well. 

But what is not well is now that third party applications like VIPM or LabJack that expect to see LV in C Drive are annoyed and refuse to start. 

How to make them see the reality and get along with LV in D Drive ? Or only copy the Runtime of LV17 to the path they expect ? 

[rolfk · Accepted solution]

Create a symbolic link or hard link on your C drive that links to the installation on your D drive.

mkdir "C:\Program Files (x86)\National Instruments"

mklink /d "C:\Program Files (x86)\National Instruments\LabVIEW 2018" "D:\NI\LabVIEW 2018"

replace /d with /j if you want to create a junction point instead.

A few differences between the two:

- you can create a symbolic link to a non existing target, a junction requires the target to be present

- junctions only can target local file system locations, not remote ones

- junctions only can point at absolute paths, symbolic links can be relative to their own location

- symbolic links require elevation (explicit administrator login) to create them

In general if you target a location on the same volume or one that is built into your machine and doesn't easily get detached, you can use both, otherwise you really want to use symbolic links.

[MogaRaghu]

@rolfk.

Thanks..that worked !