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I've searched around but none of the "fixes" I've found have worked (running installer .bat manually, alternate mirrors, etc). Any help or other resources would be greatly appreciated. Every time I run the installer I get the normal fluff log output with this at the end before it crashes:

Loading http://mirrors.concertpass.com/tex-archive/systems/texlive/tlnet/tlpkg/texlive.tlpdb
xz: (stdin): Compressed data is corrupt
Installing TeX Live 2018 from: http://mirrors.concertpass.com/tex-archive/systems/texlive/tlnet (verified)
Platform: win32 => 'Windows'
Distribution: net  (downloading)
Using URL: http://mirrors.concertpass.com/tex-archive/systems/texlive/tlnet
Directory for temporary files: C:\Users\fewr\AppData\Local\Temp\NzH1K9lEZQ
Installing to: C:/texlive/2018
Installing [0001/3638, time/total: ??:??/??:??]: 12many [376k]
tar: Skipping to next file header
untar: untarring C:\Users\fewr\AppData\Local\Temp\NzH1K9lEZQ\IZqygHcgBk/12many.tar failed (in C:/texlive/2018/texmf-dist)
TLPDB::_install_package: untar failed
Installation failed.

Thanks!

EDIT: I tried using basic, advanced, custom, exe, zip download, and everything in between. I tried multiple mirrors and even making a portable install. Everything crashes with this exact error message.

fewr
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  • Welcome to TeX.SX! Could you please add some details how you install (basic installer, advanced, custom selection, …)? – TeXnician Aug 08 '18 at 06:15
  • @TeXnician I tried using basic, advanced, custom, exe, zip download, and everything in between. I tried multiple mirrors and even making a portable install. Everything crashes with this exact error message. – fewr Aug 08 '18 at 06:21
  • Well, the error message says untar failed. Could you check the log of your virus scanner if it has been active and noticed "suspicious files"? – TeXnician Aug 08 '18 at 06:27
  • @TeXnician I just checked the logs, nothing at all in there. Do I need to manually install untar? Also, does this line xz: (stdin): Compressed data is corrupt hold any significance? – fewr Aug 08 '18 at 06:34
  • Unfortunately I'm not on windows, so I have no clue about the requirements there. The xz line should be okay, because it seems to have loaded the package database correctly and recognized 3638 packages. – TeXnician Aug 08 '18 at 06:38
  • @TeXnician I did some searching and installed tar on my system using cygwin just to be safe and I don't think untar isn't running properly. Is that tar file corrupted somehow? I've tried multiple mirrors and they all give the same error though regardless of whether or not I include the "12many" package. – fewr Aug 08 '18 at 06:40
  • Related: https://tex.stackexchange.com/q/250820/117050 – Skillmon Aug 08 '18 at 06:59
  • @Skillmon Thanks, however I tried every solution in that thread (confirmed or otherwise) and none of them worked. The only thing that has worked so far is installing TeX Live 2017, but I'd much prefer 2018 if it's possible to get it working. – fewr Aug 08 '18 at 07:01
  • @fewr I'm sorry to hear that nothing there helped you. Can you try installing http://gnuwin32.sourceforge.net/packages/gtar.htm and restart the installation (I'm not on Windows, too, so I can only guess things)? – Skillmon Aug 08 '18 at 07:04
  • @Skillmon Sure thing, I'll add some xz tools to my path too for good measure. FWIW, after playing around some I get this error instead: C:\Users\fewr\AppData\Local\Temp\qttoQcVy42\GeHUckdv88/ae.tar.xz failed – fewr Aug 08 '18 at 07:14
  • @Skillmon So, after installing xz, tar, etc tools and making sure I could run them on sample compressed files I restarted the installer to get the error I mentioned in my above comment. It's different than the one I was getting but the installer still crashes. – fewr Aug 08 '18 at 07:19
  • @fewr did you try the GNU tar tools or the BSD ones? On the page I linked was a note that BSD tar tools are faster and better. Perhaps those will fit. – Skillmon Aug 08 '18 at 07:35
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    You shouldn't need to install any other tools sets like Cygwin, etc to install TexLive. Is the problem that you are not running TeXLive's version of "untar," and the version you did run has different command line options or whatever? – alephzero Aug 08 '18 at 13:00
  • "Also, does this line xz: (stdin): Compressed data is corrupt hold any significance?" - It could means what it says, "the data is corrupt", or it could mean that you are running the wrong version of some Unix-like utilities and they can't understand the data. – alephzero Aug 08 '18 at 13:02
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    @alephzero I tried installing before I had any of those separate tools (Cygwin etc) downloaded and got the same error. One more thing, with the tools installed I did install a working version of TeX Live 2017 from the historical repository. – fewr Aug 08 '18 at 19:48
  • I am using the basic installer on a Windows 10 computer. I have tried to do what is explained here, but continuously run into this error as well. I turned off Windows Defender as far as I can tell, and have tried both running as admin and not running as admin. The TexLive/2018 folder has stuff in it, but there is no /bin folder as I believe there should be. – Pro Q Sep 11 '18 at 01:06

4 Answers4

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I had the same Problem. It was caused by MinGW, more specific by xz from the MinGW Installation. I just renamed the xz.exe (you could probably also just temporarily remove the mingw path from the path env) so the texlive installer wouldnt use it and i later restored it to the original name.

An indicator could be the detailed output of the installer (install-tl-windows -gui text -v -no-cls). At the beginning the installer is looking for the setup programs. If you see a line like this:

D:trying to set up system xz, arg --version
D:program xz found in the path*

and also have a line like tar: Skipping to next file header (indicates that the tar is corrupt) at your previous error output/log this might will fix your issue. You can verify the usage of the shipped xz by looking at the detailed output again - it should print (after renaming the other(MinGW) xz.exe) something like this:

D:program xz not usable from path
D:(w32) trying to set up xz, default I:/tlpkg/installer/xz/xz.exe, arg --version
D:Using shipped I:/tlpkg/installer/xz/xz.exe for xz (tested).*
TingelJ
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    MinGW is something similar to cygwin. My Description is probably not complete or wrong but it is kind of a linux-like environment. I`m simply using it to have linux-tools like gcc and grep available under Windows. Both Cygwin and MinGW usually contain xz and are present in the Path Env and thus the texlive installer will use not its own xz which could lead to the described problem. Hope this helps. – TingelJ May 07 '19 at 03:11
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    Had been chasing this forever. This did it with TL 2019 on windows 10. Remove references to mingw on your path variables. – Ernesto Jul 13 '19 at 17:02
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Let's see ... this has worked (for me) most of the time:

  1. Let's go to the execute menu and type %temp% and delete ALL ... the same from the "administrator" account, that is, we clean the system's temporary ones and the failed installation folders in C:\

  2. Download (compress file) from install-tl.zip and unzip it.

  3. We enter the folder and with the right mouse button on install-tl-advanced we click using "run as administrator" ...
  4. You wait between one and two hours and ... ready..HapyTex

If this happens to fail ... download dvd version and repeat the steps ... always keeping in mind that we must have permission to administer the installation.

Pablo González L
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It seems to be the problem of access level. I encountered the same problem, I inspected my temporary folder (%tmp%) and found no tar file was copied to this folder and the installer tried to extract from nothing, the "extract" will certainly fail. Then I found my temp folder is set to read-only, but I cannot uncheck the read-only check box somehow, cause after clicking OK button, it becomes read-only again. Anyway I gave it up and continued my journey with MikTeX, everything work fine now. Perhaps it's a stupid idea to copy files from a full installation DVD to a temp folder for extraction. I decided to rewrite the awkward installer before reusing them.

l.yang
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I had exactly the same issue, and had been searched for solutions for a day. The point raised in the comments by @TingeJJ and @Ernesto indeed worked. So I propose it as a solution.

I removed C:\MinGW\msys\1.0\bin from the PATH system variables. Then everything went smoothly by just using the bat file in the iso image.

unstable
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