Dimension Pro install molasses slow

So about 25 minutes ago I popped disc 1 of 2 into the DVD drive of my DAW and started the install. It just now asked for disc 2 and only after I removed and reinserted disc 1. Once again it appears to be doing nothing. Anyone else have this problem?

Jeff,
thanks for the feedback. The DVD drive is the latest and greatest and I don't have problems with it on any other software. The activity light is only flashing once in a blue moon. The status applet is updating only when I maximize it and won't change filenames otherwise.

Jeff,
I disabled NAV autoprotect and switched to the other DVD drive on my unit. It acted a little different but did the same thing, which is, it stopped at "Extracting...15 - Strings 7z.022". In this drive the activity light is on continually at this point. On the other drive the light was off. I guess I have a bad DVD disc since it looks like its hanging up on the strings file in either drive.

Well finally it got through the install. Stayed locked on the string file for about 5 minutes and then finally asked for disc 2 and now it's running again.

ORIGINAL: jmarkham

don't it suck? .. i hate media errors.

jeff

You betcha! Seems more and more common these days. I read somewhere last month that the available CDR and DVDR media out there will last 4 years if you're lucky and the best back up is still tape or hard disk. It's a good thing they've come way down in price.

Well finally it got through the install. Stayed locked on the string file for about 5 minutes and then finally asked for disc 2 and now it's running again.

That's very normal CAW, and it's not an indicator of bad media. The Strings file has to extract like 2GB, so it takes several minutes.
The total installation time should be less than 20 minutes for most drives/dvd/computers combos.


-René

My entire Dimension Pro installation is 7.37GB. It came on two DVD's. Why was there a need for file compression anyway?

ORIGINAL: René
We used compression for two reasons:
a) Speed up the installation process. ...
b) Protect your DVD reader. ...

With proper compression the whole 7.9 GB DimesionPro folder fits into a single 4.3 GB RAR-file, so it would fit onto one DVD completely.
That would speed up and protect.
And extracting that archive directly into the target directory would read the archive on the DVD sequentially and saves also the hard disk head, avoiding wild jumping while copying 7 GB from one location at the HD to another in quite small chunks, as the current DimesnionPro installer does it.

Of course, the buyer's perceived "price per DVD" is only half if you put 2 DVDs into the box.

But hey, after installation much nicer sounds come out of the box, so that impatient waiting for the installation to finish one forgets quite fast when playing with the sounds afterwards. So what the heck discussing here ...

With "extracting the archive into the target directory" I mean extracting, not copying.
I use the word extracting in the sense of unpacking.
Then no additional disk space would be required. And no separate unpacking step from archive on HD to destination on same HD would be necessary, which causes a long time to finish due to hevy HD-head jumping from source sector to target sector - many thousand times.
Additionally seems the current installer add quite a bit to fragmentation of the HD due to the additional steps of copying archive, unpacking, deleting archive. An unpacker, which allocates the complete target filesize on NTFS at once before unpacking would enable the NTFS feature, to allocate that space un-fragmented.

But that all is finetuning, important is, that the VSTi is well done. And that seems so.