AutoCAD Mechanical 2013 - Installation Failure

[pmiles2]

I am trying to install AM 2013 on my computer.  I am a student, so this is from the student downloads section of Autodesk.  I just installed AutoCAD 2013 on my computer just 2 weeks ago.  All went fine.  I have 2012 and 2013 up and running.  All are 64-bit versions.  Running Windows 7 Professional 64-bit with all the latest updates.

This is what the installer says:

Installation complete.  Some products failed to install.

AutoCAD Mechanical 2013

An error occurred while installing this product.

Installation log file attached.  I tried twice after the initial download, then tried re-downloading and installing, same results.  Error codes 1603 and 1619 reported in the attached log.

Nothing has changed in my setup since I installed AutoCAD 2013.

Only thing I will note is that the "Install Now" feature was operational on the Autodesk site when I installed AutoCAD 2013 (that's the download method that I used).  This time I had to use "Download Now".  Just offering that bit of info in case the downloader is downloading a corrupted file.

[pmiles2]

I just downloaded AutoCAD Mechanical 2012 64-bit and it installed just fine.  I re-downloaded AM 2013 64-bit and it failed to install just like previously.

This leads me to believe that the file being distributed by Autodesk is corrupt. 

AM 2012 went through 6 phases during it's install process (i.e. 1 of 6) but AM 2013 only had 4 phases (1 of 4) and it always fails before reaching phase 4.

Can you have your IT guys check the file?  Something is amiss.  There should be no reason AM 2012 installs and AM 2013 doesn't.

[aguitton116]

I have the same problem with Factory design Suite 2013. Everything is OK but Mechanical. For the moment I unchecked it in the installation process in order to have the other products, but I'm stuck with this and still need Mechanical.

I don't understand why it doesn't work because I installed it on another windows 7 station and it went fine.

I'm on an dell M6500 with win 7 pro SP1 x64 french and the other station is a Dell T3500 with win 7 pro SP1 x64.

I wil ltry again after the other products are installed because I'm not quite sure that windows SP1 was installed on my last try (I just formatted my laptop yesterday and the first tries were before all windows updates were installed).

[pmiles2 · Accepted solution]

Here's the deal.  AutoCAD and AutoCAD Mechanical share the same base installation... hence they are installed in the exact same directory.  The problem with this setup is that the installers assume a base installation (i.e. no service packs installed) when they run.  So for example, if you have AutoCAD 2013 installed and happen to update it with the service pack, the AutoCAD Mechanical 2013 installer will fail to install.  IT WILL NOT OVERWRITE NEWER FILES.  This is true the other way around. If you have AutoCAD Mechanical 2013 on your system with a service pack installed, the AutoCAD 2013 installer will fail to install.

Here's the kicker, once you apply a service pack, you may not be able to remove it because, in my case (Windows Pro 7 64-bit), it doesn't show up in Add/Remove Programs.  Thus you really don't know that a service pack is installed or not.  I had to uninstall AutoCAD 2013 (to get rid of the service pack), reinstall it (making sure not to update it), then install AutoCAD Mechanical 2013.

Keep in mind that the installer will spew out the same error code for a whole host of reasons.  This is just one of them.  It will also fail due to a later version of the C++ redistributable being on your system... but it usually states that is the problem.  It will fail due to permissions issues as well, but that would likely affect all AutoCAD products.  All in all, it's  needle in a haystack error code.

[aguitton116]

I'll try that tomorrow. I included the service pack for Autocad Architexture (factory design suite) and it's probably relateed to this.

[aguitton116]

It works, thanks a lot !

Too bad there's no "Accept as solution" button on your posts (I don't know why).