I work as a guest on a Windows PC. I was asked to install software only on drive D:. My rights on drive C: are limited.

I did not find a way to specify for the installing application to install Limma (first installation) on drive D:.

I allowed installation on drive C: successfully.

When completed, I followed the instructions and executed "biocLite("limma")"

The run of the script ended with the following message:

The downloaded binary packages are in
        C:\Users\admonlab\AppData\Local\Temp\RtmpAHbQK7\downloaded_packages
installation path not writeable, unable to update packages: MASS, mgcv, rpart
 

I guess this has to do with my limited rights to update drive C:

Is this guess correct? How do I overcome the problem?

How in general can ​I instruct the installation program to install Limma on drive D:?

a) the final message might be simply a warning. If you do library(limma), do you get an error? If not, the limma package is correctly installed, but the others packages failed to be updated. Not a big deal if you installed R recently.

b) if you want to install packages at another place, the simplest way is to specify that location before running R. Usually this is already done and packages that could not be installed in the default path will be installed in you user writable path. Usually Sys.getenv("R_LIBS_USER") returns something like "C:/Users/my_login/Documents/R/win-library/3.4", meaning that R will install packages there.

c) if you want another default location, you can change the environment variable R_LIBS_USER before running R. More on this at https://cran.r-project.org/doc/manuals/r-devel/R-admin.html#Managing-libraries

d) you can specify the path of the packages by hand using the lib argument of install.packages() and library(). Read the doc of these functions.

HTH