APM Agents installation failing on Windows: RC_INFO: ProcessAfterDataMove

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The installation of APM agents on Windows platform is straightforward and most of the time it completes successfully with a very small effort.

When it fails, you can find into the installation file called:
Abort_IBM_Monitoring_agents_<timestamp>.log

all the information that can help you to perform an effective troubleshooting.
There is anyway a scenario where the error message returned by the installer does not helpso much.

I faced this condition only few times with ITMv6 agents and just once with APM agents,
but it is anyway useful to know some actions that may help fixing it in case you experience something similar.

It can  occur with any kind of agent being installed on a Windows platform, it is not agent-type specific.
When installation fails, you can find messages like these in the abort log file:

10-15-2018 09:21:11: CopyFile(C:\IBM\APM\bin\tacmd_wrapper.exe to C:\IBM\APM\bin\tacmd.exe)
10-15-2018 09:21:11: WARN: Cannot find tacmd_wrapper.exe to replace tacmd.exe with
10-15-2018 09:21:11: SEVERE:Cannot enum directories internal logic error, function %s, install will abort! ProcessAfterDataMove
10-15-2018 09:21:11: ProcessAfterDataMove - Cannot enum directories internal logic error, function ProcessAfterDataMove, install will abort!
10-15-2018 09:21:11: SEVERE: ERROR - Install aborted.

And the last message of the file will always be:

10-15-2018 09:21:11: RC_INFO: ProcessAfterDataMove - Cannot enum directories internal logic error, function ProcessAfterDataMove, install will abort!

It looks like the problem starts when the process fails to find file tacmd_wrapper.exe and then it writes
a SEVERE message regarding ProcessAfterDataMove function that leads to installation abort.

This kind of scenario occurred few times also with the ITMv6 Windows OS agent, that shares most of the installation code with APM ones.
The most common root cause is a corrupted and/or incomplete installation package, but in some cases it also happened
that the same symptoms were experienced when other MSI installation processes were unexpectedly active on the system, likely due to other failed/hanging installation attempts.
The processes may have names like setup.exe, isetup.exe,msiexec.exe, idriver.exe, IsUninst.exe, IsUn16.exe, Uninst.exe, Uninst16.exe or ISBEW64.EXE

So if you find such processes running on the system and no installation is actually going on, you can try to kill them using Task manager.

Another possible explanation deals with temporary files left into TEMP directory by previous Installshield executions.
So you can try to delete the contents of your temp folder.
InstallShield recommends opening a command box and note the location of your temp directory (%TEMP%).
Type deltree /y followed by the name of your temp directory.

If the command doesn't work, you can use Windows Explore or navigate to your temp directory.
Click Select All in Edit menu and then select Delete from the File menu.

Of course if you have the chance to perform a system reboot, this can be even better as it would
take care of the above conditions plus other possible temporary issues that can be related to the problem.

If nothing of the above helps, then there is a meaningful chance that the installation package is somehow
corrupted or incomplete.

In this case the suggestion is to download again the configured package from the APM server and compare
the size with the one you are using right now.

It will help to check whether the package size is the same or not and if also the content is different.

Try anyway to run the installation using the newly downloaded package but please also be sure you are installing
with an administrator account or with an account having administrator privileges, as per Installation instruction here:

https://www.ibm.com/support/knowledgecenter/SSHLNR_8.1.4/com.ibm.pm.doc/install/install_windows_agent.htm

All the cases that showed aforementioned symptoms were fixed with one of the suggested actions, so I'm confident
they can help you in case you also experience something similar while installing Windows APM agents.

Thanks for reading

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