You know that feeling you get when you start to do something that should be quick and easy and it turns into a monster of a task that threatens to overtake your weekend? That’s what happened to me at the end of last week. I wanted to write about it here to remind myself how to solve it quicker and hopefully help others do the same.

I had just recently setup my development environment on a new company laptop so I was surprised to get an error while trying to add a feature to my Visual Studio installation. I needed to add the Office Tools support, which I’ve done several times in the past on numerous machines without problems but, this time, I got the now infamous ‘A Selected Drive is No Longer Valid’.

A quick web search brought back several blog posts and numerous posts on message lists. The blog posts were well written but covered a single cause and solution while questions on message lists often suggested many causes and offered solutions to a portion of those. They seem to have been in both Visual Studio 2008 and 2010. I’m hoping it will be fixed in the 2012 version but I’m not holding my breath. I’ll try to summarize a list of the possible causes and solutions here.

Possible Causes:

• Installing Beta or CTP or Post RTM of new tools or libraries (Silverlight, Windows Phone Dev Tools, C++, etc.)
• Installing to a drive other than the system drive
• Applying SP1 seems to add complications if not cause issues directly in combination with other tools
• Installing the SQL Management Studio (which uses the stand-alone install of Visual Studio)

Possible Solutions

• Uninstalling the Beta, CTP, or Post RTM tools or libraries before attempting to add the feature
• Uninstalling SP1, adding the feature, then installing SP1 once again
• Installing a final release of Beta or CTP either before or after installing SP1 depending on whether it is included in SP1

Finding a Solution

The real secret to figuring out what is causing the issue is to check the log file located at %temp%\dd_install_vs_vstscore_100.txt. This will have a line of text near the end of the file similar to:

VS70pgui: ***ERRORLOG EVENT*** : Unable to retrieve the install directory for Visual Studio Async CTP in COptionsPage::IsGoodAllComponenentsPath

This line will usually mention a specific tool or library that you will find in Add/Remove Programs so you know which item to uninstall. In my case it had the following:

VS70pgui: ***ERRORLOG EVENT*** : Unable to retrieve the install directory for Microsoft Visual Studio Performance Collection Tools for v4.0 in COptionsPage::IsGoodAllComponenentsPath

I believe this may be due to having installed SQL Server 2012 Developer Edition which uses a stand-alone install of Visual Studio 2010. I say this because while solving the issue by uninstalling SP1, I was prompted for the MSI for vs_setup.msi. I was puzzled by this until I looked closer at the prompt which mentioned Stand Alone and that jogged my memory of the SQL install. The SQL Management Studio will use a stand-alone install of the previous version of Visual Studio. So SQL 2010 uses Visual Studio 2008 and SQL 2012 uses Visual Studio 2010. At any rate, I had to mount the ISO for SQL Server 2012 and point it at the proper location to complete the uninstall of SP1.

This leads me to a rant on the current state of MSI install fun with mounting ISO files on different drive letters and then being prompted for an MSI file without a mention of what the original location. But I’ll save that for a later time.

Cheers,

Ed