Sunday, June 24, 2007

Upgrading to Delphi 2007 Update 1

Why should seemingly simple things induce so much frustration? I attempted to update my Delphi 2007 and lost more than 5 hours in the process and I haven’t finished yet. The InstallAware wizard is still installing. Everything started normally when I received a notification that Update 1 was available. So I downloaded the setup program and started the process. It seems that the setup program first uninstalls the whole of Delphi 2007 and then installs the updated copy. However, after uninstalling, it displayed a message saying that “Extraction of installation data downloaded from the web has failed. What would you like to do? Download a fresh copy of the installation data. Try to extract the existing download data again”. None of the options had any effect (I tried both many times) so the only choice was to quit the installer, leaving me with a computer without Delphi on it anymore! After googling a bit, I logged into Borland and downloaded the ‘Full download zip file (757MB)’ from CodeGear. However, installing from this file also seemed to produce exactly the same strange behaviour. Even though downloading from the web seemed to work fine, ‘extraction of data’ failed and nothing worked. I found the solution by luck: when the message appears, first select ‘Download a fresh copy’, then quit the installer and restart it. The installer will now properly extract the previously received file, but may fail on a subsequent one. Do the same thing for each file. This may require that you restart the installer many times, but eventually things work out OK.