Installing Office 365 on a different hard drive to that of the windows installation

Question

Hi Guys,
I have an office 365 account and was using it succesfully on my pre-installed windows 8. My PC crashed and I re-installed windows 7 on it. I put the windows installation on my 20gb SSD and, as you have guessed, there is very little space left over on it
for anything else.
I do understand the technology around the installer etc when you download from office365.com, but is there no way to work/get around this problem and install it to my 500gb HDD?
Any help would be greatly appreciated as I need my office back up and running for business.

Answer 1

Alright CharlieWright I think I have a solution to this problem!
It's weird, and it's kind of hacked together, but it seems to be working. Use this solution at your own risk, I have it working and i'm quite happy with it. With this solution windows basically *thinks* office is where it's supposed to be (C:) but it's not
there, instead there's an automatic pointer to where it actually is (your other storage device). It's called a junction.. hence the /J later.. anyway, here's what I did:
1. Create a backup of everything in case this breaks your device. It shouldn't, but you never know.
2. Download and install LockHunter (lockhunter.com), it's a software I used to simplify the process. Without LockHunter you'll have to manually end process on everything that keeps you from accessing the office directory.
3. Empty your recycle bin.
4. Find every directory that office references, I only had one, some people have 2, I don't know if there are ever 3. They're commonly found at:
C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office 15
C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Office
5. Run CMD Prompt as administrator
6. For each Directory:
- right click it (ie Microsoft Office 15 folder) and select "what is locking this folder?"
- unlock it and navigate back to that directory.
- delete the directory (send it to your recycle bin to relax)
- in the cmd prompt type: MKLINK /J "Full original directory" "Desired destination directory"
for example:
MKLINK /J "C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office 15" "D:\Program Files\Microsoft Office 15"
MKLINK /J "C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Office" "D:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Office"
7. Create the destination directories manually.
8. Test the junction, if you did everything right, when you navigate to the original directory it will look like a shortcut folder and clicking it will look as if you're still on the C drive but you're not, you are actually in the destination directory. If
you did something wrong you'll get an error.
9. Open your recycle bin, click the directory and click restore