Installer limited to 4 GB ?

[Cosmin]

Hello,

While working on our installer, I have added many files and the total space is now over 4 GB. After building the installer and trying to run it, I get an "Access denied" error message.

Is there a limit to 4 GB for the installers? Please advise. Thank you!

[Ulrich]

The file size of the self-extractor should be under 2 GB in order to work properly. While you might be able to create bigger files, they may not work properly on Windows - you will see this error:



In the build log, you might see this warning:

Warning 7300: Your setup is over 2GB in size. For maximum compatibility it is highly recommended that you split your executable up into 2GB segments.

Even building this setup as a 64-bit native setup will not help working around this limitation. Instead, you could build a segmented setup where each part does not exceed 2 GB in size:






You will receive two or more files as a result, like this:



In order to provide your users with a single download, you can offer the segmented installer as an archive. You could use a file compression utility like WinZip, WinRAR or similar to create this archive, but this means that the customer would need to decompress the files to the hard drive before he could actually start the installation. On the other hand, you could ship your files as an ISO image, and the user could mount the image as a virtual drive, accessing the setup directly from the archive without the need to decompress or copy the files to the HD first. There are several products that allow the mounting of ISO images as virtual drives, some of them are free. In Windows 8 and later, this feature is already built into the operating system.

Yet another possibility, used by a few companies when an installer is huge, is providing a stub: You offer only a small installer for direct download from your server, and when this executable is run, the download of the required files is done for the user, possibly in the background, while he can continue to work. When the files were transferred, a shortcut for the installer can be placed on the desktop, or this installer can be started, etc.

Finally, you can build a setup which uses external files. Instead of packing these files into the self-extractor, they would need to stay in the same source folder as the setup, so they can be copied/decompressed at runtime to the proper target folders.

Ulrich