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Shiraz Bhaiji
Asked: 2009-08-18 03:34:17 +0800 CST

Re/Installing an MSI, getting 'not a valid short file name' error

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We are running windows 2008.

We have a windows service called ImportService, that is installed via an MSI package.

A previous version was installed about 3 months ago without problems.

When have now unistalled the previous version. When we try to install the new version we get the following error:

’ImportService’ is not a valid short file name

We then tried to reinstall the old version and got the same error. We therefore think that there has been an update during the summer that has changed the relevant settings.

The question is how do we allow this to be a valid filename?

windows

2 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    You could try opening the .msi in Orca or other .msi packager/editor and look at the 'Shortcut and File table' to verify the ShortName and LongName entries are correct and valid. The ShortName needs to be a valid 8.3 filename.

    For example

    IMPORT~1.DLL
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  2. I know that this is pretty old but we came across this problem ourselves. We found in the MSI logfile that the information it retrieved regarding the various install folders (favorites) were pointing to an non-existant network drive.

    Check the HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\Shell Folders for issues.

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