How To Change the IIS Installation Path

By default Internet Information Services (IIS) is installed in c:\Inetpub\wwwroot folder. For security reasons, you should move it to another location, such as a different drive or partition. During installation you are not given the option to move IIS folders to a new location. However, there are a couple of ways of moving IIS to a different location. The first method is not suitable in all cases but is rather simple. The second method is the recommended method because it will update the registry entries appropriately.

METHOD 1
You can create a new folder on a different drive, e.g. E:\MyWebFiles and move all your files there. In IIS Manager simply point to the new location. This method will work for basic HTML code but has its limitation and is not appropriate for all Web sites.

METHOD 2
This is the recommended method. Create an unattend.txt file which will be used to install IIS. For more information on unattended installation of IIS, check out How To Perform an Unattended Installation of IIS 6.0.

Essentially, you need to point to the new path in the unattend.txt file.

[InternetServer]
PathFTPRoot=D:\Inetpub\NewFTProot
PathWWWRoot=D:\Inetpub\NewWWroot

For more information on configuring how to use the unattend.txt file check out the KB article How to Change the Default Installation Paths for FTP and the Web.

Copyright ©2005 Zubair Alexander. All rights reserved.