Issue installing vfp9 server 2016 1

[white605]

Has anyone successfully installed vfp9 on windows server 2016. The setup.exe is starting and then just dies with no reference to the process in the process explorer.

This old world keeps spinning round - It's a wonder tall trees ain't layin' down

 

[Olaf Doschke]

All I remember is you start something else, look into autostart (what would be started, when autostarting would still be the norm is specified in there), I'd say it was a vfpstart.hta or similar.

You might first need to install the older version of windows installer \WCU\windowsinstaller\winnt\instmsiw.exe

Bye, Olaf.

 

[white605]

We have tried all of the above and nothing seems to work. We have also made sure that we are running as administrator with full privlages. Do you know of this being done successfully?

This old world keeps spinning round - It's a wonder tall trees ain't layin' down

 

[Olaf Doschke]

No, this was helping with previous version of Windows, both server and client. Maybe the functionality if hta was removed from Windows 2016?
Do you see any related message to the start of hta or the setup.exe or the instmsiw.exe in the event logs?
And perhaps more important, did you retry vfpstart.hta and/or setup.exe after installing instmsiw.exe?

Bye, Olaf.

 

[white605]

instmsiw.exe would not install - it said wrong os version
vfpstart works but call setup.exe which promptly dies
we dont see anything in the log files suspicious

This old world keeps spinning round - It's a wonder tall trees ain't layin' down

 

[Olaf Doschke]

>instmsiw.exe would not install - it said wrong os version
Then the installer system which was current at the time of VFP9 doesn't work in Windows Server 2016. No need to worry in itself, as a more modern installer "should" be downward compatible.

But: vfpstart.hta should only start a html page giving the choice to install prerequisites or VFP, it will not start any setup on it's own and automatically.

What does event logs say?

Bye, Olaf.

 

[Dan Olsson]

I presume you already have VFP installed somewhere else?
In that case you CAN simply copy the entire map to a new place.
Then you run "VFP9.EXE /regserver". The only thing that does not work is F1 starting the helpfile

 

[Olaf Doschke]

Yes, that's a hack, which might help, but often enough a clean setup is preferrable.
You can mend the help file "affinity" by SET HELP.
But VFP features also depend on MSXML3 and MSXML4.

Another question: Do you really need VFP at the server, are you developing applications server side? You rather only need to install VFP runtimes to run VFP DLLs or EXEcutables, no VFP IDE.

Bye, Olaf.

 

[TamarGranor]

Rick Schummer tweeted today that he ran into this problem and used the approach suggested by DrDoolittle successfully.

Tamar