Re: "1-Click" installer problems

Nikhil G. Daddikar, 01.04.2010 08:04:
>
> In about 30 seconds I found the following unanswered threads relating to
> installation on Windows Vista. If anybody is interested I can find more.

The problem with this kind of statistics is that you will only find people who complain, you'll never find people who do not complain because they have no problems. Actually that's true for all internet forums or mailing lists: you'll seldomly find people posting something like "Hey everything works fine, I had no problems".

All the posts seem to share the same root cause: the data directory has been put into "c:\Program Files" but a regular user does not have write permissions on that directory. As the installer is usually run with Administrator rights, the directory can be created but the service (or initdb) runs under a normal user account that cannot write to that directory because.

I do not like the installer's suggestion to put the data directory into c:\Program Files either, I think this should default to %APPDATA% instead of %ProgramFile%. I bet half of the problems would go away if the installer refused to put the data directory into c:\Program Files.

Given the fact that Microsoft finally tries to enforce people not to work as Administrators makes this even more important.

My suggestion is to try to use a different data directory when installing Postgres and make sure that the postgres service account is allowed to read and write that directory.

Personally I switched to using the ZIP packages completely because it is so much easer (unzip, initdb, pg_ctl -register, done)

Thomas