Spanning Installations over Multiple Disks or CDs

InstallShield 2020

As programs become larger, the need for disk spanning increases. Years ago, this meant shipping your product on multiple floppy disks. The standard is now to use CD-ROMs or DVDs. Although the storage space on a CD or on a DVD is significantly more than what is available on a floppy disk, many products require even more space. Multimedia tutorials, vast help libraries, and graphic-rich programs can result in a product that is larger than 650 MB—the size of a standard CD.

If your installation requires more than one CD, DVD, or custom-sized media disk, you need to span it across multiple disks.

Using the Release Wizard

The only way to define how your installation spans across multiple disks is to use the Release Wizard. The wizard’s panels walk you through the process of creating your release for any size media that you choose, and it lets you specify how your files will span across multiple disks. You can also specify the compression to apply to these files.

The wizard offers you the choice of having InstallShield automatically span your installation across disks, if necessary, or you can customize how you want your installation files to be split. If you plan on customizing the way your installation spans across multiple disks, refer to Disk Spanning Rules to reduce problems with your installation.

Limitations

Due to limitations of the Windows Installer service, you cannot run multi-disk installations on a non-removable drive. For example, if your installation spans two CDs, you need to physically burn the CDs in order to test your installation. If you try to run it from a fixed drive, the installation will fail.