Cannot install update today! Dead in the water.

[Mr_Blastman]

I have been able to update DCS fine with every update over the past seven months.  Today, that streak of running well ended.  I cannot apply today's update for the AH-64 module.

 

Currently, I have 18 modules and I'm dead in the water.  They're paperweights now, as I play mostly online.  What can I do?

 

The update is failing always the same way at the same spot.  For whatever reason the updater is making my SSD drive for DCS vanish.  It then re-appears.  The drive is new, Samsung Evo, works fine for everything else.  I even verified by copying a 50 gb game install over to the drive this afternoon without errors.  Still, even after that, these problems persist.

 

I cannot update DCS.

 

 I have attached two error logs.  I have been waiting months to try the Apache.  Please help!  Thanks.

 

 

 

Solutions tried so far:
 

Free up space.  Didn't work.

Turn off antivirus.  Didn't work.

Reboot a million times.  Didn't work.

Uninstall the Syria theater to make the download smaller.  Didn't work.

 

Edit:  This update is bizarre, at about 2.5 gigabytes downloaded EVERY SINGLE TIME my throughput drops from 11mb/sec to nearly 0 and everything grinds to a halt and my SSD becomes bogged down by a ridiculous amount of I/O writes.  Huge amounts of writes around the 11,500 of 31,064 Mbytes on the completion bar.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

autoupdate_log.txt autoupdate_log_old.txt

Edited March 17, 2022 by Mr_Blastman

[Mr_Blastman]

Latest update log...

 

autoupdate_log.txt

[Mr_Blastman]

I literally hit a wall at 2534.6 MB downloaded of 10,700.8 MBytes every time.  Bam.  Downloads nearly halt and throttles down.  Meanwhile Steam and everything else is downloading and installing fine...

 

[Mr_Blastman]

Yet another failed attempt.  I'm really becoming disheartened here.

 

Please help someone.

 

I ran error checks on the drive.  I trimmed the drive.  Nothing has shown up as wrong with my machine.

 

 

autoupdate_log.txt

[Baldrick33]

My only suggestion is to copy your installation to another drive if you have enough space and update it and then move the installation to your SSD.

[Mr_Blastman]

I do not have anywhere close the required space on another drive for DCS.

 

Latest attempted solution:  Tried new updater.  Still failed.

 

The issue seems to be with the unpacking of files.

 

Why was this not an issue in past updates?  What is going on here?  Is there a way to download a single, comprehensive zip of this update?

 

Edited March 17, 2022 by Mr_Blastman

[Baldrick33]

Does the drive come with any software? If so is it running? Is there a firmware update available for it?

it feels like the drive is running at 100% unpacking and times out the DCS installer.

[Mr_Blastman]

No, it is a standard issue Samsung 1 TB EVO drive.

 

[Baldrick33]

Not sure if this link covers your model but it maybe worth looking at the software and firmware available

https://semiconductor.samsung.com/consumer-storage/support/tools/

Edited March 18, 2022 by Baldrick33

[Mr_Blastman]

Thanks, I'll check that out.    Do you happen to know if there's a way to set the installer to download and unpack updates on a different hard drive before copying over to the Eagle Dynamics folder on the primary operation drive?

 

[Jazbo]

Mr_Blastman, You are not alone. I am having a near identical problem and have tried all the same things you have. I have a Samsung EVO 1TB as well.

My symptom is slightly different in that it does not fail the update in the same spot. It seems it has problems with the unpacking and it has happened with various files mostly in the terrains, Mariana or Syria and sometimes other files. The log files are mostly the same, the first indication of an error is for hash mismatch while unpacking.

I have the latest firmware on the drive and I have run the Samsung diagnostics and everything says its working fine. I'm getting pretty frustrated as well.

[Mr_Blastman]

56 minutes ago, Jazbo said:

Mr_Blastman, You are not alone. I am having a near identical problem and have tried all the same things you have. I have a Samsung EVO 1TB as well.

My symptom is slightly different in that it does not fail the update in the same spot. It seems it has problems with the unpacking and it has happened with various files mostly in the terrains, Mariana or Syria and sometimes other files. The log files are mostly the same, the first indication of an error is for hash mismatch while unpacking.

I have the latest firmware on the drive and I have run the Samsung diagnostics and everything says its working fine. I'm getting pretty frustrated as well.

I do not think this is our SSD that is the problem and I will outline why:

 

I created a "hard link" to the x:\Eagle Dynamics\DCS World\_downloads folder from a new \dcsdownloads folder I made on a traditional platter drive.

"hard link" is a term for those familiar with Unix/Linux/BSD/etc., otherwise known as a "junction" in Windows 10.

What does this mean?

 

Well, when you access the x:\Eagle Dynamics\DCS World\_downloads folder, the default update folder, you are actually accessing it on another hard drive than the SSD--i.e. all downloading and unpacking will be done on the platter drive instead of the SSD.  DCS doesn't know the difference, as this link is invisible.  I essentially tricked DCS to use another hard drive to do the downloading and unpacking on, while keeping the game and everything else on the SSD.

When I did this...

Same problem.

This update is bugged.

There's something broken with where we're downloading our file from.  I live in Georgia in North America.  Perhaps DCS sorts downloads by region?  This is frustrating as heck.

 

ED please address and fix.

 

Latest error log is attached.

 

 

autoupdate_log.txt

Edited March 18, 2022 by Mr_Blastman

[Mr_Blastman]

Subsequent attempt to append to prior download resulted in yet another crash.

autoupdate_log.txt

[Mr_Blastman]

After multiple attempts to append to the download by starting the downloader over and over... I finished downloading!  Then... I failed in the unpacking.

 

The leopard_2a error is cropping up over and over.  It is as if there is corruption in the install package we are downloading from the server.

 

Also, every time I start the updater again it finds hundreds of files with zero bytes.

 

autoupdate_log.txt

Edited March 18, 2022 by Mr_Blastman

[Mr_Blastman]

Made it to 90% on this attempt while unpacking...

 

THEN FAILED
 

leopard-2a4.zip: (1117) The request could not be performed because of an I/O device error.

 

I'm willing to bet the problem with this update has to do with the FLIR textures.

 

autoupdate_log.txt

Edited March 18, 2022 by Mr_Blastman

[jserdynski]

yes, same here, starts, then just shuts down

[Mr_Blastman]

Failed again, this time with the BTR82A.zip

 

I have two files causing the problems.

 

ED, can you supply me with fixed versions of these files?  I open them manually in windows explorer and everything looks fine...

 

autoupdate_log_old.txt

Edited March 18, 2022 by Mr_Blastman

[jserdynski]

removing the mb339 mod fix it for me

[Mr_Blastman]

Failed yet again on leopard-2a4.zip (cyclic redundancy check).

 

I need a proper version of this file to try again and test.

 

autoupdate_log.txt

[Mr_Blastman]

OKAY

 

I deleted leopard-2a4.zip and the BTR82A.zip files from the main DCS install, ran the repair tool and it FINALLY detected them as a problem(because they were missing) and re-downloaded them.

 

I then ran the updater again... and it finished unpacking.

 

It is now copying files off the spoofed hard link platter drive to the SSD.

 

 

The repair tool should have detected those two files as problematic before, saving me hours of frustration.

 

edit:  Updated successfully!

 

I now have to re-download Syria

 

What a mess this update has been.

 

so cliffs notes:

 

1)  hard link/junction link a directory on a platter drive to spoof the _downloads folder in main DCS install so downloads are tricked to downloading on separate hard drive where they will also unpack before copying to SSD.  See above posts for details.

https://mywindowshub.com/how-to-create-and-delete-a-junction-link-on-windows-10/

 

2) spam the updater for a few hours until it downloads everything after crashing repeatedly

3) deleted the two files as mentioned earlier in this post, ran repair tool, re-downloaded, then updated again.  These files may be different for other users.  Check the log and find a pattern where it keeps failing while unpacking.  Not sure why there isn't built-in redundancy here to try and re-download them when this sort of error occurs during install.

 

 

 

ED:  I saved the two broken files in case you need them...

 

Edited March 18, 2022 by Mr_Blastman

[Baldrick33]

Some good troubleshooting there Mr_B!

As frustrating as it seems that is kind of what open beta is about. If this didn't happen to anyone in the closed beta testing then the next step in the bug discovery is open beta.

Having worked in Corporate IT where we have standard PC builds and do not allow users to install their own stuff I do have some sympathy for PC games developers where every PC is different and all sorts of mods are installed. Let's hope the next one is less work to install for you though!

Edited March 18, 2022 by Baldrick33

[silverdevil]

10 minutes ago, Baldrick33 said:

Some good troubleshooting there Mr_B!

As frustrating as it seems that is kind of what open beta is about. If this didn't happen to anyone in the closed beta testing then the next step in the bug discovery is open beta.

Having worked in Corporate IT where we have standard PC builds and do not allow users to install their own stuff I do have some sympathy for PC games developers were every PC is different and all sorts of mods are installed. Let's hope the next one is less work to install for you though!

i too am in IT. if we distributed an 80 GB application to 10s of thousands of computers with a few of them failing, it would be called a success.