Visual Studio 2008 on an External Hard Drive?

My laptop had an install error with Vista Ultimate and now it does not let me run Visual Studio. I was able to inst开发者_开发问答all Visual Studio 2008 on my HP TouchSmart without a problem and now I use it on there. I want to be able to travel though. So I was wondering if I take the folder in which Visual Studio was installed and put it on my external hard drive and just run it off of there. Is this possible? I've managed to do it with other programs before.

No this will not work with Visual Studio. You're essentially asking if Visual Studio is xcopy deployable. It unfortunately is not. It relies on many items which are not simply a part of the install folder including ...

• Registry Keys
• Certain versions of the CLR being installed
• Supporting programs and libraries

And many, many other items.

As others have said, because of the dependencies it is not xcopy deployable. Maybe Virtual PC is the answer to your problems.

You can install VS 2008 on some other drive/older in your computer. Bu VS 2008 needs to run some DLL or other files to run in the OS. So you can not install it.

There are many pre-requisites that are installed with VS 2008, so I think that it's not a good idea.