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…