'Installation of VS2010 or VS2008 failing on the first component (eg Visual Studio 2010 64 bit prerequisites) with error 1320'

ISSUE DESCRIPTION:

Installation of VS2010/VS2008 failing on the first component (eg. Visual Studio 2010 64 bit prerequisites) with the following error message-

‘Error 1320.The specified path is too long: C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 9.0\Common7’

ENVIRONMENT:

This is applicable to 64 bit Operating systems, running Vista/Server 2008/ and Windows 7/Server2008 R2.

Symptoms :

You see the error message and you exclaim “A path as short as ‘C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 9.0\Common7’ too much for Visual Studio to handle!”

Well if this is the path that you see, or any other path for that matter, provided the total path length appears to be than 150 characters, then you actually have a problem with how the folders in the path have been set up.

Here is a snapshot of how the location (‘C:\Program files’ in this case) might look like in a command window

Here are steps using which you can see a similar view, in case you are not very familiar with MSDOS-

1. Click on ‘start’

2. Click on ‘run’

3. Type in ‘cmd’ and hit ‘enter’

4. Type in ‘cd c:\program files’ and hit enter

5. Type in dir /a and hit enter

Notice that the Type for most of the folders, including ‘Microsoft Visual Studio 9.0’ is ‘SYMLINKD’ . A symbolic link is a file-system object that points to another file system object. Symbolic links are transparent to users; the links appear as normal files or directories. A symbolic link contains a text string that is automatically interpreted and followed by the operating system as a path to another file or directory ie. ‘the target’ . If a symbolic link points to a target, and sometime later that target is moved, renamed or deleted, the symbolic link is not automatically updated or deleted, but continues to exist and still points to the old target, now a non-existing location or file. Symbolic links pointing to moved or non-existing targets are sometimes called broken, orphaned, dead or dangling.

RESOLUTION:

The resolution is very straight forward: just rename or delete the existing folder named ‘Microsoft Visual Studio 9.0’ and launch the setup of Visual Studio.

You will see a new folder of the same name ‘Microsoft Visual Studio 9.0’ getting created during the installation. During the installation you can again check the program files location to see the new entry for the folder with the correct type,’dir’.

Hope this helps.

Content by: Ritwik Sinha