Installing an Application copies entire CD to temp directory
Posted by admin on Mar 24th, 2007
I have a Gateway laptop that came with Vista Home Premium installed. I have run Windows update to get any new updates. When I put a CD in my CD/DVD drive, it spins for a long time (3 4 minutes). I noticed that it was creating a large file in the Windows/Temp directory. While it is doing this I can not run the Setup application on the CD. It appears to have copied the entire CD to a single file in the Windows temp directory. Then I can run Setup to install the application, but it appears to be accessing the CD and not the hard drive.Why is it doing this CD copy, and how can I make it stop?
Mar 27th, 2007 at 05:40 pm
The contents of the CD are compressed and the installer decompresses them to a temp folder. The program then installs from the temp folder. After the install has completed, and you reboot if necessary, a good installer will clean out it's temporary files that it created.This is why you may need 1 gig of free space to install a 400 meg program. Regards,Richard Urban Microsoft MVP Windows Shell/User (For email, remove the obvious from my address)Quote from George Ankner: If you knew as much as you think you know, You would realize that you don't know what you thought you knew!"bgille"
Mar 31st, 2007 at 09:18 am
That makes sense, except the install reads from the CD and not the hard drive. I would think if it was reading from the temp directory it would not access the CD again. After it finished copying I did doubleclick on the Setup file on the CD (via Explorer). It did not automatically start the setup. Also, there seems to be no way to stop Vista from copying the entire CD. I will have to check, but I believe with XP you could pop in this CD and explore the contents of it without it copying the entire CD to disk.With Vista there was literally a 4 minute delay. "Richard Urban" wrote: