Thursday 8 April 2021

Installer tip

I'm really enjoying RAD Studio 10.4.2, but my journey with it got off to a less than wholesome start. I'd installed from the .iso download and put just a basic Windows platform support in. Shortly thereafter I wanted more target platforms installed so I chose Tools, Manage Platforms... and was disturbed to see this message:


O NOES!!11111!1!!!one!! (or some other geeky response)

Fortunately there was no corruption. This post is simply to pass on the tip of what to do if you happen to see this, instead of following the knee-jerk reaction of immediately uninstalling and reinstalling.

The issue here is misinformation. It's not necessarily corrupted at all - the installer displays this message if it cannot find the installation database file. When you installed RAD Studio the location of the installer file is written to the registry within this key:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE\Embarcadero\BDS\21.0\CatalogRepository

The value ServicePath in that key points to a .gof file, in my case F:\radstudio_10_4_esd_104203a.gof. The thing is, I installed from a .iso file, which I mounted to a drive (F:) at the time and had since unmounted, ∴ that path no longer reached anything. Unfortunately the installer responded inappropriately: misinformation.

I gather this issue will be fixed for the 10.5 installer, but hopefully this saves someone the trouble of an uninstall and reinstall at some point.


3 comments:

  1. I switched from the ISO to the web installer a few versions ago and haven't looked back. I still eventually download and archive the ISO file but I see no reason to actually use it over the web installer these days.

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    Replies
    1. It seems it may be the way to go, Lachlan. For some reason I always swerve back to the .iso!

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  2. .. and with the iso the getit won't fetch updates (something I always forget). One should stick to the web installer (notice for myself) ;-)

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