My girlfriend has to use Windows, because university she studies does not give her another option. Now she got some crap on which she should do some statistics. This crap is being called SAS. I have not yet seen how does it look like, but I already enjoyed funny hours with it's installer. As I'm currently on the other side of world, I have to do all remotely...
The basic problem is simple: I do not have much space on C: drive and it does not provide option to install on another drive. First she tried to install it herself, the setup fucked up so much, that it deleted NTLDR and friends from root folder, so Windows didn't boot up again. Fortunately there is also Debian on that machine, so she booted to it, I installed ntfs-3g and restored needed files from Windows XP installation CD (the recovery console did not work, don't ask me why). So great, after about one hour we have back working Windows!
Now I still did not have idea what is the problem. However the failure appeared when the crap was trying to install some special JRE it has included. When I started the installer for this JRE manually, it showed that there is not enough space. Why the hell did not the original installer show this? Well I did some cleanup on the disk and I got 1GB of free space. Hope that it will be enough.
No. Somewhere near 58% installation is fucked up again with error -2147483648. Wow nice number! Looking at disk space, it's down to few kilobytes. So again the same problem! Okay, let's clean it up more and hopefully installer will resume. But I should not hope for anything good from this installer. The only option it now gives me is to reboot.
Reboot, start again installer and let's see what will break this time. Now it found out that some Microsofts runtime is missing. Why it was not missing last time? Okay, let's install it and (of course) we need another reboot. System started up, installer launched and it seems to go on quite well, only the last few percents are taking incredibly long, but the crap seems to finally installed and it even runs!
Few questions: Why they do not check for required space in installer? Why do they force me to disable anti virus during installation? Why does not remote desktop from Windows work? Why is there such mess in Windows, especially in Windows folder? Why are temporary files located all over the disk?
As last but not least thing I would like to thanks everybody who made ntfs-3g and VNC work, I would never fix this without these tools.
