Installing Visual Studio 2012: ngen hangs / does nothing

Question

I am trying to install Visual Studio 2012 Professional RC (upgrade from VS 11 Beta to Windows 7 x64) and I find that the installer seems to be "hanging" at a seemingly arbitrary time. I use quotation marks because the installer's user interface is still completely responsive; it seems that he is sitting and refusing to move on. I observed the following:

• The msiexec.exe instance (32-bit, running as SYSTEM) calls one of my 4 cores.
• It seems that 2 instances of vs_professional.exe are working (both use my identity). One of them (the main instance of the UI) constantly uses 1-2% of the CPU, apparently, while it is engaged in its activities to check whether it is necessary to update the progress bar, etc .; another instance does not use any processor at all.
• The ngen.exe instance seems to be sitting doing nothing, i.e. does not use CPU.

When I run the setup and specify the location of the log file, I see how the installer generates log files for all the components that it successfully installs. When it gets into a package that freezes (every time I run the installer), the common denominator every time is that it just made a call to ngen.exe to create its own image during installation. This freeze occurs regardless of whether I try to install, uninstall or repair

I tried to leave the car to make it at night, sometimes until 4 p.m., and when I return, it still gets stuck in the same place. If I canceled the setting from the user interface, I see a message in the user interface that says: "Stop the current session", but nothing happens. If I kill the ngen.exe process, I can see in the log file that the installer moves to create / delete another native image, which again causes a hang. If I kill the inactive vs_professional.exe file after clicking on cancel in the user interface, the installation will complete successfully with the message "X of Y components have been installed / removed successfully."

Any ideas / suggestions? I'm in my mind trying to clear up this mess!

Answer 1

I had a very similar situation with the VS2012 update.

I found that you can resume paused ngen processes and complete the installation completely, but I did this by installing all the components separately (using the / layout option for the installation file).

Another note. If you look at the paused ngen process and the args command with which it was started, you can start ngen with the same arguments and execute it successfully.

Answer 2

I spent most of the day struggling with the same problem. I had success by creating a new window profile and installing from there. I used Windows 8 x64 (which did everything that was even more frustrating)

Hope someone helps.

Answer 3

Below are the steps that I always do to fix almost the problems associated with the Windows installer (SQL, VS ...) Before proceeding to the details, you should know the path to the log file when Windows saves for ease and / or research yourself :

Default:

C: \ Program Files (x86) \ Microsoft SQL Server \ 110 \ Setup Bootstrap \ Log or C: \ Program Files \ Microsoft SQL Server \ 110 \ Setup Bootstrap \ Log we can see one or more folders here: 100 for SQL2008, 110 for SQL2012 and 120 for SQL2014 ... you have to take care of the time / date folders. Setup.exe was created

Now go into the details:

Almost the problem I encountered hangs / does nothing / disappears ... and cannot complete the setup (hangs forever) → you can see the log file and know why it always behaves forever, it is easy to find out when you read the logs :)

Step 1: Verify that the initial installation is correct.

Step 2: When you meet, freezes / does nothing .., the program queue and reboot 01 times

Step 3: Restart the setup - if it still crashes, open the task manager and note that new programs “pop up” and DO NOT disappear (In my case, it crashes in ExecuteStandardTimingsWorkflow, and I saw that the built-in compiler with the Microsoft open language (ngen process ) pops up, but DOES NOT appear, so I finish the task manually, and Windows continues to run the setup)

Step 4: Some temporary programs cannot uninstall / remove or run some component configuration, so you need help. Reading the log file and the final scroll page, you can see the latest progress, and if programs cannot do this, you need help.

Step 5: Taks Manager and find the Windows installer (msiexe processes), and some of them DO NOT respond, and you need to kill it manually.

Step 6: Restart the computer when it freezes Someday, programs need to restart 01 to complete some task, and it will continue automatically after restarting.

This is what I always do, and the 99% installation case has been fixed and works stably after that. Hope this helps :)