Mailbag: Why am I prompted to insert the Visual Studio 2005 DVD when installing from the DVD?

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Question:

I am trying to create an integrated installation DVD that includes Visual Studio 2005 as well as some other programs. I burned a test DVD and used the instructions you previously posted to launch unattended setup directly from the DVD. However, when I do this, Visual Studio 2005 installation fails. When I try to run setup in full UI mode from the DVD, I receive a disk prompt asking me to insert the Visual Studio 2005 DVD. How do I figure out what is wrong and fix this issue?

Answer:

For scenarios where a disk prompt appears, the best place to start to look for explanations is in the verbose MSI log file. According to the list of Visual Studio 2005 log files, setup creates a verbose log file named %temp%\vsmsilog*.txt (where * is a randomly generated ending).

In most cases where disk prompts appear, log entries similar to the following will appear:

MSI (s) (58:88) [09:43:56:812]: Source is incorrect. Volume label should be DVD1 but is MYDVD.

When Visual Studio setup is run from removable media (such as a DVD), it expects the volume label to exactly match what is specified in the VolumeLabel column of the Media table in the MSI. If the media volume label does not match what is listed in the Media table, then setup will prompt you to swap discs.

For Visual Studio 2005, the volume label varies depending on where you received your copy of Visual Studio.

For MSDN subscriptions, the DVD volume label must be DVD1 for all editions of Visual Studio.

For retail versions of Visual Studio 2005, the DVD volume label varies based on what edition of Visual Studio is being installed:

Note: For any Visual Studio 2005 edition not listed above, you can use any volume label you choose because the Media table of their MSI files do not include VolumeLabel entries. Those entries are left blank because the product is small enough to fit on a single CD and therefore the volume label is not used by Windows Installer (as described here).