Visual studio installation path grayed out

Question

I had to reformat one of my drives (T:) and change its purpose. I had Visual studio 2015 installed on it, uninstalled it before formatting and now the drive has a different letter (can't change it, other things installed on it). I want to install visual studio 2015 again, but on the C: drive. When I run the installation, I get this:

The T: drive doesn't exist anymore, and I can't change the installation path to another drive.

I tried some solutions where I had to delete registry keys, but didn't succeed since most of the solutions were for older versions of visual studio. Is there a way to change the path?

Answer 1

I had the same problem. I had an installed Visual Studio on a crashed harddisk. I tried everything above, nothing worked. You should use this method as ultima ratio:

There is a VisualStudioUninstaller by Microsoft.

1. Download it
2. Extract it
3. Run it with Setup.ForcedUninstall.exe in an administrator command prompt

If this fails: Start an elevated powershell:

install-package msi -provider PowerShellGet
get-msicomponentinfo '{777CBCAC-12AB-4A57-A753-4A7D23B484D3}' | get-msiproductinfo | uninstall-msiproduct -properties IGNOREDEPENDENCIES=ALL

Try again. If this fails, replace the GUID with one of the following:

Visual Studio 2015: {777CBCAC-12AB-4A57-A753-4A7D23B484D3}
Visual Studio 2013: {56E09E41-21B6-4F87-8D60-0787D028ECDD}
Visual Studio 2012: {DB786F13-64A8-45D7-8C03-0E819DF9F7B3}
Visual Studio 2010: {01696F98-947C-4CF9-8BD3-ABE70332FDED}

Sources: blogs.msdn.microsoft.com and landinghub.visualstudio.com

If this fails get an exorcist or/and reinstall your system.

Answer 2

For me, it was the mistake of installing SQL Server Management Studio 2016 before installing Visual Studio 2015. SSMS 2016 is now based of VS 2015 Shell Core. And the new setup doesn't allow for any interaction except pressing the Install button. That way, part of VS 2015 was installed to C: drive. And hence, all options to change VS 2015 Enterprise install path failed.

I removed SMSS 2016 and, explicitly, VS 2015 Shell Core and then tried to install VS 2015 and it worked with Custom Path and Browse button.