Windows Error 2356

Question

A client is having some problems installing my software on their machine. The exact error code they get is "The installer has encountered an unexpected error installing this package. This may indicate a problem with this package. The error code is 2356". This is a Windows error, and means "Could not locate cabinet in stream". My software was built using Advanced Installer, and installs fine on other machines.

I am trying to find all possible causes for this, before I go back to the client.

So far, I have found posts where this is caused by

1. 32/64 bit merge module problems
2. Corrupted install file

Are there any other causes that you guys know of? It might be worth noting that my client's machine language is (probably) Finnish, whilst the machine I build on is English.

Solution

Thanks for your quick response Mihai, but I have now found the cause of the error.

The cause of this bug was a missing cab file in the .msi, because of a misconfiguration in my setup.aip file.

For future reference, I ran the following command to get debug output from msiexec, which was more useful in finding out why the install failed

msiexec /i FileName.msi /L*V output.log

The error message I found was

DEBUG: Error 2356:  Couldn't locate cabinet in stream: media1.cab.

Which led me to re-examine my setup.aip.

Thanks for you help!

Comments

[Stein Åsmul]

Just a quick comment for others with similar problems: it is a common problem that some CAB files are flagged as malware (false positives) by some anti-virus suites. Use virustotal.com to check for false-positives for your MSI. Upload the MSI and also zip up all binaries and upload as zip to be sure.