Traditional NI-DAQ 7.4.1 installer fails

[UA polarization lab]

Hello,

Sorry if this is the wrong message board, I'm new to this.  I installed the 7.0 runtime engine on a machine that has no NI boards installed.  When I attempted to run one of the exes, I got the message, nidaq32.dll missing.  I found that this meant that I had to install the traditional ni-daq drivers on the machine on which I installed the runtime engine.  I found and downloaded the traditional ni-daq 7.4.1 installer, and I am attempting to run it.  (I should say I'm running on a standard Windows XP SP2 box, nothing special, but the only other NI software installed is the 7.0 runtime engine).

However, when I execute the resulting "setup.exe" to install, it runs, but once it actually tries to install the selected components I receive the error:

The "xxx" installation has failed with the following error.
The system cannot find the file specified.
Continue?

The "xxx" is replaced with each of the components that it wants to install (upon hitting "Continue"), starting with "NI Uninstaller", though that is just the first of many.  If I hit continue until the end it indicates the installation failed, and it appears that nothing has been installed.  I still am missing the nidaq32.dll.

What is going wrong?  How do I successfully install the traditional ni-daq drivers?

Thanks in advance for any suggestions.

-Eric Twietmeyer

[Yardov]

Hi Eric,

Thank you for all the details. This is the LabVIEW forum and your question is more related to DAQ but no worries, here is my opinion on the issue:
You should not have problems with this installation. I would think on two possible problems:
- If you download the driver from the web, they come in ZIP format and when you run the setup, some of the files are still compressed and cannot be found. The solution is to extract all files into a folder and then run the setup.
- There could be a conflict between the runtime version you install and the version of the runtime it gets install with the driver but the error message is different. Can you try to uninstall the runtime engine and install the driver first? To uninstall the runtime fo into control panel»add and remove software and select NI software. This will list the runtime engine.

Hope this helps,

[UA polarization lab]

Hi,

Thanks for the advice.  It turns out that it was something quite a bit more obscure.  I did not realize that .msi installers actually run in the context of a Windows service, which runs under its own account (usually the Windows SYSTEM account, and not the current log in account).  Because of this if you attempt to execute setup.exe (or any of the .msi files directly) from a subst drive, then it will fail with the errors I saw.  The "subst" dos command creates fake drive letters, but these are only local to the current user, so the SYSTEM account under which msiexec.exe runs does not know about this fake drive and so the installation fails with the errors I was encountering.  The error from msiexec is error 1305, the file can not be found.

I post this just so that it can be part of the knowledge base in the off chance that someone else runs into this problem.

Thanks again.

-Eric Twietmeyer

[Yardov]

Hi Eric,

Great information! Thank you for posting the answer and make this thread useful for others,

[PLTW_Tchr_Andrew_S]

10 years later.... Your post has rescued me from a puzzling obstacle to installing MultiSIM 14.1 for education!

I had downloaded and unzipped the installer to my trusty google drive, which was mapped to look like drive g on my system, but as you described it failed.  All it took to solve the problem was to copy the installer folder to my local hard drive, and install from there.  Well done Eric!  If you ever get to Hillsborough NC, drop me a note at andrew.seligman@orange.k12.nc.us and I'll buy you a beer 🙂

Andrew

Project Lead The Way engineering instructor and FIRST Robotics mentor