How To Install Windows 8 App Store Apps On Different Drive Location

Step 1: Make sure no Modern apps are running on your machine. You may reboot the system and then do it before running anything else. Launch an elevated command prompt (one with Administrator rights). Step 2: Run the following command to take ownership of the WindowsApps folder (this is where Modern UI apps are installed by default). takeown /F “C:\Program Files\WindowsApps” /A /R TakeOwn Step 3: The directory now needs to be copied (not moved) to the new target location, which I’ll take to be D:\WindowsApps. Run the following in Command Prompt: robocopy “C:\Program Files\WindowsApps” “D:\WindowsApps” /E /COPYALL /DCOPY:DAT Robocopy Make sure that the copy action was successful and there were no errors or failure messages. If you face those, reboot the machine and start over.
Step 4: Now, you want to remove the original folder from C:\ drive using the command below: rmdir /S “C:\Program Files\WindowsApps” Step 5: Finally, create the symlink: mklink /D “C:\Program Files\WindowsApps” “D:\WindowsApps” Mklink That’s it – you can now launch any Modern UI Windows 8 app to verify that it works. In case you don’t want to play around with any of this, or if you feel uncomfortable typing in commands, you may manually move the WindowsApps folder from Program files to a target location of your choice and then change a registry entry to reflect that. However, before doing so, be advised that this will only work if there’s no Metro app installed on your machine. In registry editor, go to: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Appx\PackageRoot and change the location to the new one (e.g., D:\WindowsApps). Reboot the computer afterwards. RegEdit-Path-Change You can follow us on Twitter, add us to your circle on Google+ or like our Facebook page to keep yourself updated on all the latest from Microsoft, Google, Apple and the web.