Visual Studio 2015 installer hangs during install?

Question

I downloaded the full ISO for Visual Studio Ultimate CTP 6. The installation program got to about the 90% mark, gauging by the progress bar, and just stuck there. There was frequent activity from Superfetch, Anti-malware protection, and other background processes, but the progress bar was dead still. Eventually the background task activity subsided after 20 minutes, but the progress bar still wouldn't budge.

CHEAP TRICK: Open a notepad window and position the left edge of it so it perfectly marks the current position of the progress bar. If it the progress bar doesn't move past the left edge of the notepad window in about an hour, it's probably stuck.

Answer 1

Alright so after hours of googling and failed attempts at solving this including many of the suggestions above, I found a solution I tried on a whim and worked for me.

Attempt to install the program, then, when it gets "stuck", cancel it, but don't uninstall.

Then, go to the control panel, go to programs, go and attempt to uninstall it, select "Repair" instead of Uninstall.

"Repairing" Visual Studio appears to have completely worked and was very quick, under 5 minutes and everything seems to work fine.

Answer 2

I've got same problem and unfortunately the accepted answer which suggests killing SecondaryInstaller.exe messed up installing the optional items. What I've done is basically opening the task manager and locate SecondaryInstaller.exe and right click and click on Open file location. Then run SecondaryInstaller.exe as an administrator.

Answer 3

I temporarily disabled my antivirus (AVG) and restarted the install. That fixed it.

Answer 4

In my case UAC was disabled (the infamous regedit trick) and so the installer clearly could not handle it.

You could revert back to UAC for the installer, or simply try launching it as admin, it worked for me.

Answer 5

This was a case of one of the sub-installers getting stuck during the install and never completing. Unfortunately when this happens, it looks like the master installer never times out the operation. The trick is to open up the Task Manager in detail mode, and look for a sub-installer process that is showing 0% CPU usage and 0% disk usage, indicating it has died. Then just kill that process and the master installation will resume. In my case, the name of the sub-installer was SecondaryInstaller.exe and according to the installation log it happened while it was trying to install some Android SDK components for the cross platform development modules. It had frozen permanently. I killed it and the master installer completed. When I ran Visual Studio it was fine, although I'm guessing I'll have to do some digging on the Android components install problem.

Answer 6

I have experienced similar problems with Visual Studio 2015 Update 3. In my case core issue was corrupted windows installer cache (C:\Windows\Installer)

Here is the line from msi installer log:

MSI (s) (4C:64) [10:40:10:059]: Warning: Local cached package 'C:\WINDOWS\Installer\3442502.msi' is missing.

You should check installation logs if installation cache is corrupted same way. If it is you should pray for sfc utility to recover system integrity or you would reinstall windows from scratch as corrupted windows installer cache is a complete disaster and a reason to perform clear windows installation immediately.