Software Deployment

Weeks have passed and neither me nor my colleague have been able to package this application. We've tried with Wise Package Studio, Admin Studio and even the non-msi Zenworks thingy and nothing works. It always fails with the same "Missing vital files" message. Can it be that not a single person on this planet have ever packaged this application? I find that very hard to believe as quite a lot of people use it, though mostly for personal use, but still.

If anyone could shed som light on this matter I would really appreciate it.

ORIGINAL: Tubbe

Can it be that not a single person on this planet have ever packaged this application?

Well I haven't packaged this application, although some have suggested I am not on this planet at least some of the time [;)]

However, I'll make some suggestions and perhaps you could reply to say whether you have already tried this.

(1) When recapturing via a snapshot, did you close the snapshot immediately after installation, or did you launch the application at least once before you ended the snapshot ? Also, any mandatory reboots the installation required should have been included in the snapshot.

If you didn't capture the first launch after installation, I would suggest not only capturing the first launch, but also run as many of the available menu options in Pinnacle Studio 9 as you can (including launching the help option at least once) before finally closing down the snapshot.

(2) The Filemon tool from www.sysinternals.com should be run prior to launching the application from the failing installation. Set Filemon up to highlight any NOT FOUND messages and put a filter on to display only messages from the main Pinnacle application that is running - that way, the amount of logging you have to sift through will be vastly reduced.

(3) Not all error messages from vendor supplied applications can be trusted - it may not be missing files that is the problem, but instead may be missing registry entries. If note (2) above doesn't reveal anything, try using the RegMon tool (from www.sysinternals.com again) with the same higlighting / filtering I have suggested.


Regards,

Spartacus

Another thing to check out is whether you are installing the application to the C: drive. There appear to be a number of issues with the application when a different drive letter than C: is selected.

Try the following Pinnacle MessageBoard for more information if that is the case.

If you wish to force the application to install to the C: drive, you could always set the INSTALLDIR property on the msiexec command line to point to the installation folder you require - don't forget to use quotes around the path if it contains spaces [:)]

Regards,

Spartacus

The "Missing vital files" message could be due to the information spartacus gave you that is, if you didn't have a clean machine during your capture the package may not include files (and connected registry for ex. COM/ActiveX components) already on the machine. So during installation on another machine not including these files these will not get installed. During application launch the message ("Missing vital files") could be displayed by the application and the status "NOT FOUND" would be stated by file- and/or regmon. Also look for the status "ACCESS DENIED".

Thanks for all the suggestions. However, me and my colleague found the problem. Apparently, Pinnacle have for some reason included a check, copy-protection or whatnot in the form of validating the serial number of the volume it is being run on. We've searched for the location where Pinnacle stores this information but no success yet. Still, one could of course use the "Volumeid" tool from www.sysinternals.com to change the serial number on each volume it is installed on but I don't find that to be a viable option, more of a sloppy work-around.

For now, this application is "out the window" due to this issue.