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 wa

Answer 1

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

Answer 2

I had the same issue. It would hang immediately, as soon as it said "Applying Microsoft Visual Studio 2015." There was only a small sliver in the progress bar. I even let the install run overnight. There was no disk activity or CPU usage from the installer.

What finally worked was to kill the process in Task Manager and restart the computer. As soon as I rebooted, the installer opened up automatically and completed successfully.

Answer 3

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 4

Same thing happened to me, and I also tried to terminate secondary process from task manager. Do not do that. It is not a solution, but rather a hack which may cause issues later. In my case, I was not even able to uninstall Visual Studio. I tried both web installation and ISO, same issue.

Here is how it worked finally. I restored my Windows 7 to earliest restore point as possible, when there was nothing installed, so I was sure that there would be no conflicts between the different tools (Java, Android API, etc.)

I started the installation of Visual Studio 2015 Community Release Candidate at 10 p.m. At 7 a.m., it was working on Android API 19-21. A hour later, it was finally preparing Visual Studio.

This means that all you need to do is to actually wait 8 to 9 hours. Don't terminate the secondary installer at risk of breaking your Visual Studio; just wait.

Answer 5

For me it helped to stop the installation service forcefully using task manager. If Visual Studio was installed in Features & Programs then uninstall it, restart computer and try to install it again.

When starting the installation make sure to be have reliable internet connection

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.