Install Adobe Apps to SD Card - New Method

Report · Jul 01, 2020

Like many of you I wanted to put my second installation of Adobe onto a smaller, lighter tablet that I could carry with me when I wasn't planning on working but wanted to be prepared in case of emergencies. The device I singled out was an HP X2 10", which has 64GB of EMMC storage but supports SD cards. I've used the C:\SD method in the past but it's hit or miss and Animate seems to have issues with it and templates. The following method worked for me to get EVERYTHING installed onto a 128GB microSD card with room to spare. This works for Windows 10 Home and Pro.

Pop a big micro sd card into your tablet/laptop.

Right click on the Windows Start icon and select "Disk Management".

Select "Action > Create VHD".

Create a suitably large VHD on your micro sd card. 24GB should be enough but it would probably benefit you to make it larger. Browse to your SD card and create a VHD (example given, D:\VirtualDrive.vhd, Virtual hard disk size: 86GB).

After clicking "OK", it will take a while for the VHD to be created.

When it's complete, look in the disk list in the bottom pane. Right click the new disk and select "Initialize Disk". Be careful! It should say "Not Initialized" in the description box and match the size that you specified when you created it.

After initialization is complete, right click on the "Unallocated" panel to the right. Select "New Simple Volume". The rest of this part is pretty self explanatory, no tricks involved. Format as NTFS. Once completed it should mount itself on its own.

Open up Adobe Creative Cloud. Click on the gear icon in the upper right. Select "Apps" in the left panel. Change your install location to the new drive you created.

That gave me enough room to install the entire creative suite onto my emergency tablet.

You'll have to re-mount the VHD on startup but that's a lot fewer hoops to run and everything seems to work. There are methods to auto mount the vhd that you can find on google, or just double click on the vhd after you log in. The main creative cloud application and files still install to the main drive, but this gave me enough room to open photoshop and still have room left for a disk cache on the main drive.

Report · Jul 10, 2020

THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU!!!

I also have a Surface Go and it doesn't have enough space for the full CC suite. As you would know, the previous method of using a mounted version of the SD card got patched. This works fantastically.

Report · Nov 04, 2021

Mine came back saying it 'Cannot install to Root Path." Any solutions there?

Report · Nov 04, 2021

Yes, don't install it to the root path. The root path is the folder at the top of the drive, like K: make a subfolder. (I am not advocating and haven't tested these steps)

Report · Dec 11, 2021

Thanks for sharing, didnt think of this. Im now able to install photoshop on an ultrabook with only 64gb SSD.

To expand on your solution; you can avoid mounting it manually on startup by adding the following Scheduled task (to run at logon)

powershell.exe -c Mount-DiskImage 'path and filename of vhd file'

🙂

Report · May 16, 2022

This solution has worked! Question after we have done this. Should we delete the programs off the local storage disk?