I've decided to replace my current MiKTeX installation with TeX Live 2012, and (like previous times) it isn't going too well. Instead of giving up however, I figured I'd ask here this time 🙂
I downloaded the TeX Live 2012 image file (ISO) and mounted it on my machine.
Double-clicking the batch file simply doesn't work (my guess is it needs admin privileges), but running it from the command line (Windows+R cmd RET will start it with admin privileges) at least gets the process started. (Tkinter pops up, bunch of options, etc.).
I set my options such that it will install for all users. All other options are left as default.
The installation proceeds as one would expect until the following package is installed, throwing the following error:
Installing [0244/2479, time/total: 01:08/09:42]: boxhandler [343k] Partial download of E:/archive/boxhandler.source.tar.xz found, removing it. untar: untarring C:\texlive\2012\temp\boxhandler.source.tar failed (in C:\texlive\2012\texmf-dist) untarring C:\texlive\2012\temp\boxhandler.source.tar failed, stopping install. Installation failed. Rerunning the installer will try to restart the installation. Or you can restart by running the installer with: install-tl.bat --profile installation.profile [EXTRA-ARGS]
It consistently fails upon this, and perl.exe crashed shortly thereafter, apparently inhibiting the write of installation.profile.
The exact same thing happens with a text-based interface.
Thought: TeX Live comes with tar, right?
Best Answer
Since the TL 2012 DVD was released there have been two changes concerning this:
Both changes were related to time stamps of files. We hope that at the current status most of the errors you and others have mentioned are history, but with Windows there is never a guarantee.