Install Sibelius 8.0.1 on a non-C drive in Windows

Since Sibelius 8.0.0, Avid changed the installer, and it has a serious bug -- it assumes you have a C: drive before letting you choose the installation destination. I figured out a hack to install it. However, it doesn't work for Sibelius 8.0.1, so here's another way to approach it, before Avid's Sibelius team fixes the bug.

I don't have a C: drive, but Sibelius insists that I must do, so what we are trying to do here is to temporarily create a C: drive, and then create a link pointing crucial directories back to my system drive, K:. After Sibelius is successfully installed, we can then safely remove the temporary C: drive.

First, we need to create a Virtual Hard Drive (VHD) as our C:\ drive. I learned how to do this via this answer:

• Start → run → diskmgmt.msc (accept all defaults... I'm not doing anything special below) 
• From the menu bar select Action → Create VHD 
• Choose the location and name the file (which will be the vhd) and specify the size and click OK. My file is K:\virtual_drive_c.vhd and the size is 1G, but I made it dynamic so it's actual size is around 16MB. 
• Right click on the Disk # (underneath will be Unknown and the size and "Not Initialized"). Select "Initialize Disk" and click OK 
• Right click on the black bar of the unallocated disk space and select "new simple volume". A wizard opens up an on the second page it lets you assign the drive letter. We want C: here. Complete the wizard and you're done!

Now that we have a C: drive, we can link the important folders. I learned how to do that from this post:

• Start → run → cmd, then right click and choose "Run as Administrator". 
• In the prompt, type the following:

K:\>mklink /j "C:\Program Files" "K:\Program Files"
Junction created for C:\Program Files <<===>> K:\Program Files

K:\>mklink /j "C:\Program Files (x86)" "K:\Program Files (x86)"
Junction created for C:\Program Files (x86) <<===>> K:\Program Files (x86)

After that, Sibelius installation should run normally. In the installer, I still choose to install the program to K:, to avoid future problems running Sibelius, since the bug is on the installer, not Sibelius itself.

Afterwards, you can reboot, and safely delete the vhd file.