NI Package Manager (NIPM)
LabVIEW 2019 Download/Install Issues
Solved!
I've been going around in circles and maybe I'm just crazy. I heard 2019 was out and wanted to get my hands on it. I expect I'll be needing this for several machines so I went here and got the offline installer. It downloaded through my browser and after a painful few hours I had a 27GB ISO file with the MD5 that matched what the offline download page told me it should. So I extracted it, copied it to a USB drive, and tried installing it on another machine after running it as admin (not sure if needed). I started getting errors about packages and figured my extract, or copy or whatever might have messed up the files integrity. So I did a robocopy from the extracted files to my USB drive but still got this error when selecting several things to install like LabVIEW 2019 32-bit, LV RT, DAQmx, VISA, XNet and a few others.
Okay no problem lets just get LabVIEW and deal with the rest later. So I started the installer again as Administrator, and only select LabVIEW and any dependencies it picks. Then I get this:
Okay fine so maybe it is my extract or copy, so I downloaded the online installer from that page, and not the offline install. After running that I started the install only to notice that it was installing the 64-bit version despite on the page I selected 32-bit, so I canceled. Also during the installer selection it doesn't specify bitness just "LabVIEW" and version "2019". In the software agreement it mentions 64 bit when it should be the 32-bit I selected.
Okay fine, I already have NI Package Manager installed so I run that, select LabVIEW and Drivers, select only "LabVIEW" and let it do its thing...until there is this error.
This is on a Windows 10 x64 machine that is connected to the internet. I'm now downloading the Spring 2019 package instead from home and will try bringing that into work tomorrow to try again. Any suggestions? Is there known issues with the download package? It could be weird IT things here I really just have no idea. Attached is the errorlog from the last attempt using NIPM.
I think this may be an IT issue. Last night I tried a download/install of the LabVIEW and Drivers, and tried both just LabVIEW as well as drivers and I ran into no issues. I haven't had a chance to try looking at the offline installers (but will later today).
Looking at your log, I see this error repeated for a number of components during the online installs:
The cabinet file '<file>.cab' required for this installation is corrupt and cannot be used. This could indicate a network error, an error reading from the CD-ROM, or a problem with this package.
The '.cab' file is different for a number of installers but this indicates that there are issues with the files downloaded from NIPM and could likely be caused by a firewall or antivirus.
I'll post again later today once I've had a chance to test the offline install.
I was able to test the offline version of the installer and it also worked on my machine. Like you alluded, I believe this issue may be caused by IT related things.
Also, to address one of your other points, when I selected 32-bit software, in the summary window, the bitness of LabVIEW that I was installing was displayed and I confirmed this after the installation finished.
Attached is an image showing the expected MD5 of the download, along with the MD5 of the downloaded file, and the MD5 of the file after copying it to the external USB drive and all are good.
I unplugged the USB drive, plugged it into the Windows 10 machine I want to install it on, I right click the ISO and select Mount (built into Windows 10), and then from there I run the installer as Admin. My external drive has the ability to mount ISOs via hardware emulation and I tried that too but it resulted in the same error. I found a post saying Windows 10 might not like mounting if the file name has multiple periods in the name so I renamed it something simple. I also tried running the installer with the ethernet cable unplugged forcing no connection to ni.com. After restarting the installer multiple times, and running the setup within the ISO without mounting, I was eventually able to finish the installation process. This was after running the same setup within the same ISO that had the proper MD5. I'm not sure what was going on but I suspect disconnecting the ethernet solved it.
Regarding bitness. I went to this page yesterday:
http://www.ni.com/en-us/support/downloads/software-products/download.labview.html
Clicked Download, ran the setup, selected "LabVIEW" and in the review section I saw this:
Note that this was after I was able to successfully install using the offline install which is why some things are already installed.
I redownloaded the setup this morning and the 32 bit one is now shown in the review.
Okay just tested this theory and it is true. The "Offline" installer behaves differently if it is connected to the network or not. Attached is a new log. Near the end you see me attempting to install the cRIO package which needs the ni-functional-safety-editor-17.7.1_17.7.1.49152-0+f0_windows_x64.nipkg package. It keeps complaining that the MD5 doesn't match what it should be, despite the ISO having the correct MD5. I tried a few times running it different ways and got the same result.
So I disconnected the network, restarted the PC and reran the installer and it installed just fine. It errored out at the end for some reason upgrading the 2018 support which is odd. After restarting the installer it said there was nothing for it to install so hopefully that means it finished properly. Otherwise a Repair option would be super useful. But instead I need to uninstall (which will uninstall all dependencies) and reinstall...
Can NI make an offline install that actually works if the PC is online or not? I'd prefer an offline installer to not ever attempt to connect to the network at all.
I just tested the offline installer on a machine that is off of the network and I wasn't able to reproduce any of the errors that you encountered. Looking at your logs, I see a plethora of '.cab' file corruption and checksums not matching. Also, it's good to note that if a cab file was corrupt, the checksum would fail.
Have you tried this on another machine? Is it reproducible on multiple machines on your network? Also, is there a way that we could test it on a machine that has its firewalls disabled and any antivirus software disabled temporarily?
I ended up wiping the computer, reinstalling Windows and reinstalling NI software for the first time and had similar issues. After restarting the installer over it would get a little farther each time. I ended up searching various forums for what could corrupt files and the one thing I found was a bad stick of RAM and sure enough that was my issue. With every attempt to extract the installer, or copy a package preparing to install it, the files would some times get corrupt. I took out one stick of RAM and was able to copy and install without any issue. I put that one back and took the other out and Windows would boot but was extremely unresponsive and had all kinds of issues. Sorry I blamed NI but because the issue was periodic it was hard to pin point where the issue was coming from.
No worries! Glad you were able to get to the bottom of it! RAM issues are always the weirdest and consequently difficult to track down.
