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Installer bug for DWS Client v4.2.0.32842 when users data folders are offline.

Answered
Jeff Jones
Edited

I think I found a bug in your Windows installer for DWS Client v4.2.0.32842.

When a Windows 10 machine has the personal user folders such as Documents, Downloads, Music, Videos, etc, pointed to an external drive and that drive is offline the installer/uninstaller fails with an error message saying:

"The folder path 'USER NAME' contains an invalid character."

Then: 0x80070643 - Fatal error during installation.

In addition the properly installed client also fails to launch if those folders later become offline.

This is not a case of missing application folders. The C: drive is still present and all the Program File folders and the hidden User AppData folder is still present.

So, what is the client software and the installer software looking for that causes it to fail when the User's personal data folders happen to be offline?

 

 

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Comments

4 comments

Date Votes
  • Wendy Chuang
    • Network Optix team

    Hi Jeff Jones,

    It might be reasonable to get that error message during the installation if some user folders were inaccessible - since the installer needs to create the path on the User Pictures and Video folder. 
    However, I'm still able to launch the client after making the external drive.
    Please elaborate on the reproduced steps, including the new pathname of the user data folder.

    Thank you.

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  • Jeff Jones
    Edited

    I tried replicating this on another system and it seems to work. So I'm not sure why the initial workstation is having a problem. The workstation still has the problem though if we take the drive offline.

    Basically the location tab for predefined Windows user folders like Documents, Downloads, Pictures, Music, and Videos is set to "D:/Users/USERNAME/Documents" etc.

    1. That drive in one of the computers started showing problems so we ran some surface scans using the Western Digital LifeGuard software. Running a long scan, which can take 8 hours or so, will unmount the drive.
    2. While the scans were running the user tried to open DWS and it returned the previously mentioned error.
    3. We figured maybe we just need to reinstall the client so it wasn't dependent on the temporarily missing drive. Upon trying we also go the error message. So it was impossible to remove the old client or install a new copy of the client.
    4. We stopped the drive scan, bringing the drive back online, and we successfully uninstalled the client. We then started up the drive testing again and tried to reinstall the client with the drive offline, but the client wouldn't install.

    Ultimately we just told the user they'd have to wait until we could get the drive fixed.

    DWS seems to be the only app that doesn't run with that drive offline.

    To test on a completely different computer we hooked up a USB drive and redirected the user folders to it, then installed DWS Client, but when unplugging that USB drive the DWS Client continues to work.

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  • Wendy Chuang
    • Network Optix team

    Hi Jeff Jones,

    Sorry for missing your update. As my previous comment, it looks reasonable to get the failure during the (un)installation when some path is inaccessible. I would suggest you collect the reproduce steps(including how the customer launches the client) and client debug log collected if you want to dig more for the launch problem. 

    Thank you!

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  • Jeff Jones

    Thanks. I'll see if we can find something in the logs after this happens.

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