Please wait...

I’ve seen this error in numerous occasions now (in both virtual pc and virtual server) and even so many solutions on the web: ‘please wait while the installer finishes determining your disk space requirements’. The last time was when installing the Web Deployment tool (‘MSDeploy’) on a vitual machine:

It just sits and waits… nothing more.

Since i found a number of solutions on the web I decided to summarize them here.

Here they are:

1. Run the installation with administrative privileges;
2. Execute the msi via the command-line msiexec command: ‘msiexec /i <filename.msi>’;
3. Move the msi to the root of a local drive and re-run the msi; Could be an issue with the path length;
4. Temporarily uninstall virtual machine additions and reboot, before installing the msi; This did the trick for me when installing Operations Manager 2007 R2 but not in this case;
5. If the msi was in a zip-file, and executed directly from the archive >> First extract the file from the zip-file and then execute it;
6. If disks are dynamically expanding disks, convert the dynamic disks to fixed size disks (Thanks WaatzeG for the tip);
7. Run the msi with a reduced UI: ‘msiexec /package <filename.MSI> /qr’; Since i wanted control over my installation this was not an option for me. I would only turn to this option as a last resort;
8. Someone ran into this problem after installing XP SP3 and re-registered some dll’s; I don’t know about this one ‘cause I haven’t tried so use at your own risk:

regsvr32 c:windowssystem32msi.dll
regsvr32 c:windowssystem32msisip.dll
regsvr32 c:windowssystem32msihnd.dll
%Windir%system32msiexec /unregserver
%Windir%system32msiexec /unreg
%Windir%system32msiexec /regserver
regedit /s “Installer2Manual.reg”
RMDIR /S /Q %TEMP%
MD %TEMP%
del /q %systemdrive%temp*.*
del /q %systemdrive%%windir%temp*.*

Source for option 8: http://bloggingabout.net/blogs/harold/archive/2009/01/14/windows-installer-doesn-t-finish-determining-disk-space-requirements.aspx

9. Manually extract the file and then run the msi from the command line (option 2); <filename.exe> /extract <workingfolder>; The file I had was not an executable however;

As said, 4 was not an option for me. I tried options 1, 2, 3 and 4 but they didn’t work either… individually. Eventually what did the trick for me was a combined solution of options 2 and 3. I moved the file to the root and then executed it via the command-line… Oh, and by the way. I used an elevated command prompt.

So if you run into this problem, try the above options and try to combine them, and should you have any other solutions to this problem please mail me.