RE: setup.exe: Woe is me!

[Phil Bewig <pbewig@swbell.net>]

On Saturday, April 26, 2003 8:57 PM, Igor Pechtchanski [SMTP:pechtcha@cs.nyu.edu] wrote:
> On Sat, 26 Apr 2003, Phil Bewig wrote:
> 
> > I just killed setup.exe after over an hour of inactivity.  A total
> > of over 125MB of disk space has disappeared in the last few
> > hours while I have been running setup.exe, reading and
> > replying to email on the cygwin mailing list in this thread
> > using MS Outlook, and searching the cygwin mailing list
> > archives with MSIE.  When I killed setup.exe (using the
> > "cancel" button on the progress screen), I received a popup
> > message "Cannot open log file d:\/var/log/setup.log for
> > writing."  Are there any additional clues here?  What is
> > consuming disk?  And how do I get it back?
> >
> > Thanks again,
> > Phil
> 
> Phil,
> 
> Setup.exe first downloads the tarballs of the Cygwin packages from your
> chosen mirror to your local disk, into a subdirectory of the "Local
> Installation Directory".  If you're on a dial-up connection, it may take
> quite a while, depending on the number of packages you chose to install.
> Once all the packages are downloaded, setup.exe switches to the
> installation phase, where it installs the files contained in those
> packages (by unpacking them).  The third phase runs whatever postinstall
> scripts were in those packages.
> 
> My guess is that the space has been taken up by the local cache directory.
> Setup.exe runs in multiple threads.  The files are downloaded in a
> separate thread from the main thread (that handles Windows messages and
> updates the main window).  If the main thread is hung, downloads will
> still continue, giving the impression of disappearing disk space.  The
> fact that the "Cancel" button works means that the main thread is not
> truly hung, but something is probably screwed up with the sequencing logic
> somewhere...  It would be really nice to get a gdb backtrace, since it's
> so reproducible for you.
> 	Igor
> P.S.  FYI, larger packages (e.g., tetex) easily run into tens of megabytes
> -- 
> 				http://cs.nyu.edu/~pechtcha/
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> ZZZzz /,`.-'`'    -.  ;-;;,_		igor@watson.ibm.com
>      |,4-  ) )-,_. ,\ (  `'-'		Igor Pechtchanski
>     '---''(_/--'  `-'\_) fL	a.k.a JaguaR-R-R-r-r-r-.-.-.  Meow!
> 
> Knowledge is an unending adventure at the edge of uncertainty.
>   -- Leto II

I think my situation is different.  I have already downloaded the
files and am installing from the copy of the *.bz2 files under the
d:\package directory.  All of the activity should be confined to
the d: drive, which has over 900MB free.  The space is being
consumed on the c: drive.  I assume the space is going into
the swap file at c:\windows\system\win386.swp, which is
currently at 78MB, although I don't know that for sure.  I could
verify that by resetting the swap file to zero bytes and running
setup again, but I don't know how to reset the swap file.

Besides the large space consumption on c:, my other question
is the error message, which implies a problem writing on d:.
There is certainly plenty of space.  Does anyone know what
combination of events could cause that error message?

I said earlier, but it may have been forgotten, that I had cygwin
installed on this machine about a year ago.  I uninstalled it
using the instructions in the faq.  Could anything be left over
from that old installation that is causing problems now?

Many thanks,

Phil

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