I swear, it’s not meant to be this difficult!

All fired up after MXDU, I down­loaded the trial ver­sion of CFMX 7 and tried to install. It gets through extract­ing the files, then dis­plays the mes­sage “Please select another loca­tion to extract the files to”. Select another loca­tion, process repeats. Same message.

“Right,” I say, “I must be out of disk space” and set about delet­ing some MP3s (this is my work machine, WinXP Pro SP2). 4 giga­bytes free, same error mes­sage. 8 giga­bytes free, same mes­sage, I don’t think it’s the disk space any more. Bug­ger. I try a clean Vir­tual PC image (also WinXP, SP2). Nope.

Soooo, next step, check Macromedia’s tech notes. Nada. Check CFTalk and CFAussie. Noth­ing recent, fire off a post to each. Now, surely Google is my friend?

Pos­si­bly. House of Fusion archives, mes­sage from release of CFMX 6.1, same installer prob­lem. Solu­tion: wait until the error mes­sage is dis­played, then find the extracted files in a temp direc­tory and run the exe­cutable from there. I do that, and it’s off and installing. Woo-hoo!

Except it doesn’t fin­ish. Right at the end, I can see the final install dia­log screen telling me there’s been errors, but there’s a progress dia­log in front say­ing “installing merge mod­ule”. 5 min­utes, 10 mins, 15, ok I think it’s not going to fin­ish. Quit the process. Back to Google.

So then, I come across Steve Del­ray, a Fuse­boxer from way back. He had the same prob­lems and blogged about it while it was pro­gress­ing. Hmmm… Accord­ing to him, the prob­lem is a dodgy install file. I down­load it again.

This time, it works.

So what exactly is the prob­lem? It’s been widely reported, not just for CF but also Eclipse and other files that use the same installer pack­age. Instal­lAny­where does seem to be the cul­prit (gotta love the com­ment on Macromedia’s Live­Docs — “why do they call it ‘Instal­lAny­where’ if it don’t install nowhere?”). Surely it should be ver­i­fy­ing the archive before attempt­ing to extract the files?

A cou­ple of CFAussie posters pon­der if Macro­me­dia has either a cor­rupt exe­cutable some­where, or just prob­lems push­ing such a huge file out to so many peo­ple. I dunno. Some peo­ple report that the first solu­tion I tried — find­ing the extracted exe­cutable and run­ning that while the error dia­log is open — worked for them. Per­haps it depends how badly cor­rupted your archive is. Again, I dunno.

But any­way, it’s installed and run­ning now. I’m off to play…