Installing Visual Studio 2005 from CD fails. A network installation is requested.

The media that Visual Studio 2005 shipped on may be bad, preventing a successful installation.

To resolve this issue

Visual Studio 2005 setup may be run from a network share as an alternative to running setup from CDs or DVDs. The following procedure illustrates how to prepare Visual Studio 2005 for installation from a network share. The procedure refers to the Visual Studio 2005 CDs, but the steps are the same for DVDs.

1. Create a folder (for example, VS2005) on the server.
2. Create two subfolders, named VS, and MSDN within the top-level folder. For example:
   VS2005\VS
   VS2005\MSDN.
3. Copy the contents of the Visual Studio 2005 CDs into the VS2005\VS folder. Select Yes if prompted to overwrite any existing files.
4. Copy the contents from all the CDs labeled MSDN Library for Visual Studio 2005 to the subfolder named MSDN. Select Yes if prompted to overwrite any existing files.
5. Open Setup.ini in the VS subfolder using a text editor, such as Note:pad.
6. In the [Documentation] section, change the line that starts with "DIR=" as follows:
   [Documentation]
   DIR=..\MSDN
   Save your changes and close the file.
   Note: Completing this step prevents disk-swapping requests during setup and informs the setup program of the correct path to the MSDN Library CDs.
7. In the VS subfolder, open the Setup folder.
8. Open setup.sdb in a text editor, such as Note:pad, and add the following lines to the end of the file:
   [Product Key]
   XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
   Note: XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX is the 25 digit product key, entered without dashes, found on the CD packaging.
9. Save your changes and close the file.
   Note: Completing this step enables pre-populating the product key for the user who will install from the network share.
10. Share the VS2005 folder on the network and set the appropriate security settings. The path to Visual Studio 2005 setup from the network looks like \\[servername]\VS2005\VS\setup.exe
    Note: Setup will fail if any path and file name combination exceeds 260 characters. The maximum length of a path in Visual Studio is 221 characters. You should copy files to a path with less than 70 characters. If you create a network share for a network image, the UNC path to the root installation location should contain fewer than 39 characters.
    Note: Setup might fail if the folder names in this path include embedded spaces, for example:
    \\[servername]\VS2005\MSDN\
    \\[servername]\VS2005\Visual Studio\