With the arrival of “The Beast” I did a new installation of Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate.

Usually, when I install a laptop I download every installer that I’m ever going to need and I put them all on an external hard-drive should I ever need them again and I then run them from that hard-drive. That way, I build a catalogue of what I’ve installed.

This time, I decided to be all modern. I figured that all the software that I use is out there on the internet anyway and I can easily just install it any time I wanted it ( yes, I know – hopelessly naive ).

And so when it came to installing Visual Studio 2010, I just went to MSDN and installed via the Web Installer and then I applied Service Pack 1.

All was fine until I came to add another bit of VS 2010 Sp1 and I went to Control Panel/Programs and Features and modified the Visual Studio 2010 installation only to find that it came up with a dialog;

saying “A selected drive is no longer valid”.

Now, in all honesty I hadn’t the foggiest clue what the installer was talking about because I installed from the web. However, a bit of web searching led me to the installer log file which I believe is present in;

%TEMP%\dd_install_vs_vstscore_100.txt

and in there it said (at the bottom of the log file);

[07/22/11,09:29:23] VS70pgui: ***ERRORLOG EVENT*** : Unable to retrieve the install directory for Visual Studio Async CTP in COptionsPage::IsGoodAllComponenentsPath
[07/22/11,09:29:23] vs70uimgr: Entering DisplayMessage() method.
[07/22/11,09:29:23] vs70uimgr: DisplayMessage_START:A selected drive is no longer valid.  Please review your installation path settings before continuing with setup.
[07/22/11,09:32:44] vs70uimgr: DisplayMessage_END:A selected drive is no longer valid.  Please review your installation path settings before continuing with setup.
[07/22/11,09:32:44] VS70pgui: A selected drive is no longer valid.  Please review your installation path settings before continuing with setup.

Aha – so maybe it’s the Visual Studio 2010 Async CTP that’s breaking it?

I dropped back into Add/Remove programs and found the 2 components of the Async CTP ( you have to go into the “installed updates” section and search for Async – this is documented in the Async CTP uninstallation notes ) and removed them and then rebooted.

With that done, I went back to Visual Studio 2010’s Add/Remove features dialog and it all worked fine although I must admit that it spent a lot longer on this dialog than I would have liked it to;

and it made me wonder whether it was downloading the whole VS 2010 ISO image again – I’m not sure that I’d go with this web installer again in the future

And then I installed the Async CTP again – case solved