How To Move Microsoft Store Games To A Different Partition

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So you just bought an AAA game from the Microsoft Store over the holiday. Games such as Forza Horizon 3, can take up as much as 60GB of disk space. If you have Windows 10 installed on a limited SSD drive chances are you don’t want it filled up quickly. Microsoft has considered this limitation and offer the choice of which drive to be installed during the purchase. Unfortunately, this function doesn’t work exactly as advertised under latest Windows 10 Insider Preview. (as of this writing Version 1709 OS Build 17046)

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Install Forza Horizon 3

I’ve recently downloaded a game to be specifically installed on none Windows drive but when the game finished installing it was saved to C drive instead of D drive.

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Prompt to choose where the game will be saved under

Fix Windows 10 Games Not Saved On Selected Alternative Drive

If this happened to you, don’t worry. Do not panic and don’t attempt to look for the folder on where games are installed and move it without proper method. If you wish to move games from WindowsApps folder this is how to do it.

First, go to Settings > Apps > Apps & features

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Find the game and select > Move

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There is an additional prompt showing a list of available drive you can move this app. In my case select “Local Disk (D:)” moved the game from C drive to D drive after it was already installed under Windows partition. It’s important to note that not all games or apps have this feature to move to a different drive. For traditional Windows apps, there is no such option as “Move” only Uninstall available. If you found yourself out of disk space due to games or large apps from Microsoft Store installed under the wrong location, don’t worry this is how to fix it by moving it out of Windows partition.

11 COMMENTS

  1. It’s a shame that we can’t get it installed immediately on the drive of our choice. Mostly because SSDs have a limited life cycle when you write on them. On a side note, after a few years, the MS store is still relatively empty. 🙁

  2. what if I don’t have an option to move the game. It says “modify” and “uninstall”, and modify is grayed out so I can’t do anything with it.

  3. Everything is fine until windows reinstallation. After it there’s no way that I know to restore moved apps like Forza. Correct me if I’m wrong.

  4. Note that most games from the Microsoft Store, including Forza Motorsport 7 and most Halo games, will *NOT* work anymore after you’ve moved them to any drive other than C:! The Store app and Windows 10’s Application settings will gladly let you move the game’s data to another drive, but the game will just keep crashing back to the desktop. If you dig around in the system logs a bit, you can see that those games tend to try to access non-existent files on drive C: instead of wherever else you installed them to, and then crash.

    I first thought it’s a speed issue, SSD vs. HDD, but it’s not! I can run these games perfectly fine from a computer whose C: drive is a HDD, but they will also crash when installed to D: on a computer where that drive is on an SSD.

    It’s one of many hundred reasons why, if you have *ANY* option at all, you should stay miles and miles away of anything that has anything to do with the Microsoft Store. It’s broken, unusable, a piece of technological refuse, plain and simple. Get your games on another platform. If your games are not available on another platform, complain that you won’t buy them until they are. The best case scenario you can get when buying something from the Microsoft Store, is being able to get a refund after you find out how broken that system is.

    • You can move them and sometimes they will work, but it is a pointless endeavor anyway as MS locks the folder which means if they are on another drive, and Windows goes down, bye bye.

      As well as this, you cannot reload apps if you reinstall the OS. Meaning, you will have to re-download every app again, even though you already have the app data stored on another drive.

      Stay away from Microsoft Store. It is nothing but trouble.

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