›

Installer does "interesting" things

FlorobFlorob
edited February 2008 in Game Support
I just wanted to Instal Sam and Max Episode 1 of Season 1 (aka. 101) on my D:-drive, which had plenty of free space, but it always gave me an Error about not being able to write to a file while extracting.
Turns out the installer decompresses files on C: (which was nearly full) and then copies them.
Just thought I'd report it as this can confuse the hell out of one.

Comments

  • t_a_ot_a_o
    edited February 2008
    I believe that's because your Temp folder is located in the C: drive.
    You can give it another location if you like :)
    Just don't ask me how, I forget... :D
  • SegSeg
    edited February 2008
    How to change the Windows temporary folder.

    Don't worry about the document using Media Center, this is the same process for all Windows OSs XP and Vista.
  • FlorobFlorob
    edited February 2008
    Well, my point was actually that it doesn't make sense to me to first extract data to Temp just to copy it to it's destination, instead of extracting it at it's destination.
    If you don't think so feel free to ignore me.
  • jmmjmm
    edited February 2008
    Regardless of the reasons of using the temp folder, it is still a really bad thing to have your system disk without enough free space (With today's hard drives, having 500 MB of free space on your system disk is not too much to ask for).

    Even if you move out the internet cache, the documents and settings folder, the swap (aka paging) file and the temp folder(s) to another drive, you may run into problems if your free space gets too low.
  • SegSeg
    edited February 2008
    The files in the installer are compressed (1:3 compression ratio), so it's not an actual file copy process but extraction, validation, then file copy. There are a host of reasons why NSIS picks the Temp folder to be the extraction location, the least of which being that the temp folder is the safest place for current and future locations for file writing in regards to file permissions.

    Basically, when Microsoft does another crazy thing to Windows file permissions in the future, the temp folder is least likely to be messed around with. This way the installer is less likely to break due to Microsoft changing things. There are a few other reasons, but that's the big one that sticks out in my mind.

    But jmm's correct in having free space on your Windows system drive, even when using additional disks. Windows wasn't meant to be used on a read-only disk, so it needs quite a bit of disk space for normal operation on it's own drive.
This discussion has been closed.