Change Windows App Store Install Drive

Want to know how to install Windows App Store apps to a different drive from the default C: drive?  It’s all about the PackageRoot folks!

I was getting pretty desperate when I saw I only had 4GB left on my C: drive, I have a 90GB SSD as my Primary Windows 8 Hard Drive and by default the Windows App Store installs all programs on your C: drive in the C:\Program Files\WindowsApps folder.  There is no way to change this without doing a little manual configuration changes in the Windows Registry, so be prepared to get your hands dirty.

Video How to Change Windows App Store Install Drive

Change Windows 8 App Store Install Drive (Manual Steps)

Here are the manual steps for changing the Windows App Store install drive so that you can use a secondary D: drive for installing your Windows app store applications.

• The first thing you want to do is open RegEdit as an Administrator,
• Search for RegEdit in “Find Applications”

• Right click on RegEdit to select it
• Select Run as Administrator

• Expand HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE folder
• Expand SOFTWARE folder
• Expand MICROSOFT folder
• Expand Windows
• Expand CurrentVersion
• Right Click on the Appx folder
• Click Permissions
• Click Administrators

• Check Mark Allow for “Full Control”
• Double click on the “PackageRoot” Registry Key
• Change value to your new Windows App Install Drive location (You had to create a folder on whatever drive you want Windows Apps to install to).
• Click on OK
• Reboot Windows 8 (Don’t just sign off, you need to reboot)

At this point you are done, you can go back and remove the Allow Full Control from Administrators if you want to revert that security setting just follow the bullets up until the check mark full control and uncheck it, then click OK and close out of RegEdit.

Now when you install applications from the Windows 8 App Store they will install to your new drive location.  You can confirm by opening up your new drive folder and see the applications after they have installed.

This was one of the trickiest things I had to figure out on Windows 8 and it took various searches on forums to find the answer on how to change the default Windows 8 app store install drive.