Verify ISO before burning or mounting Visual Studio 2010 RC

Heath Stewart

If you have downloaded the Visual Studio 2010 Release Candidate (RC) from MSDN or the Download Center as an ISO and are having problems installing it, it could be that either the ISO wasn’t downloaded correctly or that it wasn’t burnt to DVD correctly.

On the installation error dialog, you will find a link to the installation log. You may find text like in the following example,

[02/09/10,21:50:27] VC 9.0 Runtime (x86): [2] CMsiComponent::Install() expects the setup file for VC 9.0 Runtime (x86), but the file failed verification.
[02/09/10,21:50:28] setup.exe: [2] ISetupComponent::Pre/Post/Install() failed in ISetupManager::InternalInstallManager() with HRESULT -2147467259.
[02/09/10,21:50:30] VS70pgui: [2] DepCheck indicates VC 9.0 Runtime (x86) is not installed.
[02/09/10,21:50:30] VS70pgui: [2] DepCheck indicates VC 10.0 Runtime (x86) was not attempted to be installed.

The error -2147467259 (0x80004005) is a generic error that occurs when installation fails. The first log line may indicate that a package could not be verified because the file was missing, or the file was corrupt and digital signature or checksum verification failed.

How to work around this issue

You can attempt to re-download the ISO file or burn it to DVD again.

After you download the ISO, please visit KB841290 to download and install the File Checksum Integrity Verifier utility (fciv.exe). Run the following command on the ISO and compare to the SHA1 hash documented on the MSDN subscribers download site for VS2010 RC.

fciv.exe –sha1 VS2010Ult_RC.iso

The MSDN subscribers download site is accessible to the public, but requires a subscription to download the files. The SHA-1 hashes are also included on the Download Center pages for releases like Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate. Whether you download the self-extracting RAR files or the ISO directly, the checksum should match exactly.

Even if the ISO is downloaded correctly, burning it to DVD may not complete correctly. If your burning software offers any verification step, please make sure to enable it. This will require additional time to burn the ISO, but could save you the trouble and expense of burning another DVD.

Mounting the ISO also requires that the ISO was downloaded completely and correctly, but it’s important to note that mounting an ISO requires that the software mounts it before you login; otherwise, a race condition occurs. Most software will mount an ISO when a startup program begins, but if Visual Studio attempts to restart after a reboot first the ISO will not be mounted and the installation will fail. If this happens, you can always attempt to manually restart the VS2010 installation.

Heath Stewart Principal Software Engineer, Azure SDK

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