Urgent: Unable to install NI Measurement Studio DAQmx Visual Studio .NET 2003

[czerwinski1977]

Hi Jonathan,

all installations run with WindowsXP Pro SP2 and 2, one even with 3 disk drives. All Windows updates are installed.

Concerning the problem-setup, my personal *feeling* is, that in former times *something* happened, perhaps a less careful uninstallation leading to remains deep down in the Windows system... Instead of the "usual" solution (i.e. re-installing the whole system), I would like to find the reason and solve the actual problem.

In a nutshell, the system seems to be slightly screwed up but work fine. Since the NI-8.3 installer is the only program that raises a problem (7.0 works fine!), I would be pleased if there were a way to find why the installer needs that particular directory on drive 😧 and does not use the intended directory on drive C:. So once again the question: Why are 19 packages installed fine and the 20th fails? How does the routine determine the target directory? I am convinced there is just a minute change to make the installation work.

Thanks again!

Reinhard.

PS: We use a PCI-6036E and plan to switch to PCI-6229. Is it reasonable so update from DAQmx 8.3 to 8.5?

[JonathanN]

Hi Reinhard,

First off, DAQ 7.0 didn't support the .NET Framework at all and thus you wouldn't experience any files being install to .NET and Visual Studio directories on your computer.  Secondly, did you ever find out the amount free space on both drives? What about the computers that work (i.e. differences in free space between C and D drives on those computers)? The reason we ask is because MSI has a unique way of determining where to install certain files to based upon the amount of free space you have on your system?

As far as determining target directories, we just ask Windows where certain directories are installed too. If they tell us, the D drive, then there's not much we can do about that.

Now, the problem area seems to be in just creating a folder on your D drive. What we could test, is to see if we delete that action in the MSI file (which means it doesn't create this folder which actually happens to be a "bogus" folder anyway), then maybe your installation will work.  Microsoft has a free MSI editor called Orca in which you can view MSI files and actually customize them. So install Orca and then browse to your DAQ 8.3 installer. Navigate from the top-level directory to \Products\NI-DAQmx\MSSupport\ and notice there is one msi file named MStudioDAQInstaller.msi.  Before you start editing this, copy and paste this folder somewhere on your hard drive. Then open Orca and drag the msi file into Orca (you should be able to also right-click the msi file and select Edit with Orca). Inside Orca, select the CreateFolder table and then delete the _Help entry.

Now re-run the installer and let me know what happens.

Best Regards,

[JonathanN]

Hi Reinhard,

One of my co-workers just corrected me on one of my statements.  Apparently, DAQ 7.0 does support the .NET Framework 1.1 and it was the first version of DAQ to support .NET.

Anyway, just thought I would correct that statement.

Thanks and let me know what happens!

Best Regards,

[czerwinski1977]

Hi Jonathan,

finally, I succeeded!

I did not want to mess up in MSI files, so I tried DAQmx 8.5, but when the installer started to unpack .NET 2.0 (although I did only select .NET 1.1 packages), I cancelled ... this was a kind of suspicious to me 😕

So I did the MSI change as you described some days ago and I am happy to report a successful installation! For the record, could you please describe what is different now (since the _Help entry was removed), what part of the installation did not happen and what consequences I might expect on this computer.

Thank you very much for your help!

Reinhard.

[JonathanN]

Hi Reinhard,

That help entry actually doesn't have anything to do with National Instruments. We include several Microsoft merge modules in our installer and one of them specifies that Microsoft will try and create that directory. From what I can tell it doesn't seem to include any files in that directory but perhaps at a latter point, Microsoft might install files there. If you are curious about what it does, you might want to check with Microsoft as they could better provide a reason.

Best Regards,

[czerwinski1977]

Hi Jonathan,

thanks for your answer & thanks again for all your help!

Cheers,

Reinhard.