[Question] - Relocate WINNT Installer

[Wijono]

In my WinXP there is a folder called "C:\WINNT\Installer" with a lot of files and folders in it, the size is quite big, 419 MB!! Some of the files are more than 3 years old.

I am running out of disk space in drive C, and desperately like to relocate that folder, either fully or partially into another partition or drive, does someone has experience on it and could help?

Thanks a lot.

Title Edited - Please follow new posting rules from now on.

--Zxian

[N1K]

In my WinXP there is a folder called "C:\WINNT\Installer" with a lot of files and folders in it, the size is quite big, 419 MB!! Some of the files are more than 3 years old.

I am running out of disk space in drive C, and desperately like to relocate that folder, either fully or partially into another partition or drive, does someone has experience on it and could help?

Thanks a lot.

I think that M$ apps such as M$ Office puts temp installation files in it...

BTW. topic should be move to Win2000 section if I'm correct..

[Zxian]

You can delete those files if you wish, but when you go to uninstall or reinstall a program, Windows may ask you for the location of the install packages.

I'd personally look for other places that you can clear out space, rather than that particular directory. Check out CCleaner that can help clear out your temp files and save you a lot of space.

[Wijono]

Thanks to the nice advice from Zxian.

It has been my habit to do the cleanup of all temporary folders, hence when I tried CCleaner, it brought me something like 11 MB, not much compared to 400 something in the WINNT\Installer folder.

So what I did is not deleting that folder, instead selected some of the older files and moved them to other partition where I have more space, so that if need arises I still can fetch them back. That way I can free something like 200 MB. So far I have no noticeable problem with that method.

[Zxian]

Like I said, you won't notice anything until you go to uninstall a program whose install package was located in that folder. Since Windows won't be able to find it, you'll get a message asking you to locate the install package manually.

Another option you can try is to resize your system partition using a third party partition manager. Acronis Disk Director is the one that I use, and so far it's never let me down (*touch wood*).

Just as a general note, you'll always want some amount of free space on your system partition. I've found that once the free space falls below 15% or so, you take a performance hit in almost everything that you do.

[nmX.Memnoch]

Be sure to check the %SYSTEMROOT%\$NTUninstall* directories as well. If your machine has been installed for that long you probably have quite a bit of those. You just won't be able to uninstall any Windows Hotfixes if you delete those directories.

[Wijono]

Thanks a lot for all the good advices.

As a matter of fact, beside moving (not deleting) files from WINNT\Installer partially, which is about 202 MB, I also have moved the following:

$hf_mig$ --> 174 MB

$NTUninstall --> 344 MB

So all in all I could free up 720MB of disk space in my C drive. With that the minimum 15% free disk space as mentioned by Zxian is achieved.

Thanks a lot again.