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wixwindows-installer

WiX MSI installer fails to install from an alias drive

Inside our .NET Framework 4.6.2 solution; we have a WiX project responsible for generating the .msi installer package for our WPF application.

The generated .msi installs fine on my machine, but not on colleague's computer.

After investigating for a couple of hours, we concluded that it was because of the nature of the D:\ drive on my colleague's computer.

The .msi was being run from an alias hard drive. He created the alias by following instructions here. So an alias drive is just a regular folder on C:\ but you turn that into an alias hard drive.

When the .msi is run from outside the aliased drive, the program installs without any problems, otherwise he gets these errors:

The system cannot open the device or file specified

Clicking Retry doesn't do anything, but clicking cancel gives the following:

The installer has encountered an unexpected error installing this package. This may indicate a problem with this package. The error code is 2755.

On my machine, I don't have any alias hard drives set up, and things just work, in other words, the program installs without any issues.

How do we get the installer to work with alias drives too?

Solution

  • This isn't supported by Windows Installer. The alias created by Subst only exists in the user profile that created it. MSI runs as SYSTEM and can't see it.