Installer stopping part-way

[NickDay]

Hi,

We are finding that (unlike on my Windows 7 development PC), an installer I have shipped (using the new IA engine in v10) is hanging part-way through and not completing.

It is hanging during the main installation phase, with the dialog displaying
"... features you selected are being configured"
and
"Please wait while the InstallAware Wizard installs KPM. This may take several minutes".
The progress meter is at about 50%.

It has hung like this on a Windows 7 (32-bit) VM under VirtualBox and also on a Win7 32 physical machine. Both were running SP1. It also hung using Parallels v6 on Mac (I don't know what Windows version).

We have had it run successfully on at least two Win7-64 PCs and an XP Pro PC.

I saw a similar issue on my development Win7 PC several months ago, and it 'went away' never to recur. At that time if I remember correctly, it was just not returning from Apply Install.

Are there any known issues which might cause this please?

Nick

[giaviv]

Dear Nick,

Please refer to this thread:
http://www.installaware.com/forum/viewt ... f=2&t=3355

Some fixed are mentioned there. Please let me know if that helps!

[NickDay]

Thanks for your help Aviv.

I turned out that it was a call to XCOPY I was making, which in some circumstances was (invisibly) prompting for permission to overwrite; corrected this by supplying a /Y parameter.

It would have helped if InstallAware installers had some kind of logging; I could have asked the remote testers to turn this on so I could see roughly where it was hanging up. I already do something like this for development reasons (but not detailed enough yet), turned on by having a file of a certain name sitting alongside the installer. Please let me know if there is something like this already built in.

On the subject of debugging, I am unable to step through my installer in its final form, as far as I can tell, since it expects to sit in a certain location surrounded by other specific files and folders (other installers it calls, and external files it copies). When you step through in the debugger, it uses a special build in a particular location I think. (Just mentioning in case you can suggest how I could step through a 'remote' build.)

Regards,
Nick

[giaviv]

Dear Nick,

Regrettably, InstallAware currently does not allow remote debugging.
Therefore, debugging a setup is only possible using an uncompressed build.
That said, you can always write your own debug asserts by using log files (with the Write to Text File command with the $LOGGED$ InstallAware pre-defined variable for example).

[NickDay]

Thank you Aviv; at least now I know I'm not missing something.
Thanks for pointing out $LOGGED$, I must read up about it.
(no reply necessary)
Regards,
Nick

[giaviv]

Haha no problem!