Flash Player 10 Installer: Unable to install - No Drive Space Available

Question

I recently formatted my system and re-installed Windows XP.
For whatever reason, Windows decided to assign my hard disk to H:\
rather than the traditional C:\. As I have been installing software
this evening, I discovered that Adobe Flash Player 10 would not
install. I was given the error message "Out of space". With more
than 500 GB of available space, I know I am definitely not out of
space. However, given that I was not prompted for a location to
install the Flash Player, I hypothesized that Adobe had hard-coded
a path beginning with C:\ into the installer. To work around this,
I mapped the C:\ drive letter on my computer to \\MYCOMPUTERNAME\H$
Upon re-running the installer with the mapped drive, Adobe
Flash Player installed without error, thus confirming my suspicion
of a hard coded path. Obviously, I will need to leave this path
mapped (thus chewing up a drive letter) or Flash Player will
probably cease to work, however I thought I would point out this
flaw so you can improve the installer for others whose computers
may vary from the usual installation configuration.
Adobe's installer should either ask the user for a path for
installation or query the Windows registry to obtain path
information. For example, if you want to install your application
into the Program Files folder on Windows, the wrong way to do it is
to hard code the path "C:\Program Files\". The correct way is to
query the registry key,
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion for
the String value "ProgramFilesDir".
Please pass these comments along to the people responsible
for the Adobe Flash Player installer.
Also, Thank you for creating Flash -- I love developing with
it and it performs so much better than Java's applets. You guys did
a great job!
Mike

Answer 1

Easy fix for you.
If you have a drive H, usually meaning you have a RAID array,
then something else may be named C. In my case it was one of the
slots on my card reader. First, you need to get rid of the card
reader as a drive C.
In XP, you would go to performance and maintenance in the
category view of control panel and from there, administrative
tools> computer management. Vista path may be slightly different
i have no clue
In computer management, click on disk management. You'll see
the drives and the drive letters displayed. Right click on the C
drive, and choose 'change drive letter and paths.' Change the drive
letter of this drive. In my case, I renamed all 4 of the card
reader 'drives' to w,x,y and z for simplicity. Note- you cannot
change the letter of the boot (H) drive, and if you are changing
the drive letters on something which has software associated with
it.. like your burner.. then you would be advised to change the
drive letter back after a restart, or you may find that software
may not work lol.. in the case of my card reader there is no
software and its plug n play and seems to still work fine.
If you did not have a drive named C then you can skip the
step above!
Now you need a C drive. Click on Start and then Run. Type cmd
into the text field and hit enter. A command box will appear. Type
into it.. subst c:"H:\windows" where C is the drive you want to
create and H is your boot drive and hit enter. You can now close
the command box.
If you now go to 'my computer' you should now see a new
drive, called drive C which has the same space as your H drive. .
Open the flash file, it will now install into the H drive and
run normally.
This new drive C is a virtual drive, and since we aren't
going to mount it, it will disappear when you restart your
computer. Its only there to trick the adobe installer into thinking
there is enough space to install. Once the installer gets started,
I assume it realises its mistake because it installs into the H
drive instead, so the C drive is never actually used.
Hope this helps :)