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Keywords: Oracle client installation error [INS-3205], Oracle 11g, Orace 12c, Intall into a different Oracle home

INS-32025 The chosen installation conflicts with software already installed in the given Oracle home

I was

installing Oracle Client into an old-existing VM. Prior to installing

the new 11.2.0.4 drivers, I uninstalled (or de-installed as Oracle calls

it) the old drivers in that machine.

The uninstall (de-install!) went successful with no errors.

Right

after I attempted to install the new Oracle client drivers. But to my

surprise I got prompted with an unusual error message:

[INS-32025] The chosen installation conlicts with software already installed in the given Oracle home.

I was

trying to install it into our usual path we always utilize at the

company in order to install Oracle client (D:appOracle").

The cause

of this problem is left-over Oracle files, most probably from a previous

“Oracle InstaClient" installation, under “Program Files" or “Program

Files(x86)" depending on your OS bit-width.

On this VM they were still many files under “C:Program Files

(x86)Oracle" folder, even though everything regarding Oracle was

supposed to have been completed uninstalled on this VM already. After

all I was trying to do a clean install.

These are

the steps I took to solve the problem. It took about 10 minutes to do

all this, so it is worth it. The VM in question has been working

flawlessly every since and is actually in-use at the time of writing, so

this fix has not introduced any problems or bugs:

1) Registry clean-up

I ran regedit, and did a search for “d:app" (we only use this folder

for Oracle client software, so before doing a clean install… there

must absolutely be no reason for any existing registry keys or values

pointing to this path). I deleted any key that had or was pointing to

this value in any way. There were a dozen.

2) Windows Services clean-up

Even though I had just run Oracle de-install, I noticed that there was

still one Windows service whose name started with Oracle. The service

was still running, or so it stated. I stopped the service. After having

done so, the service immediately disappeared from the list. This

basically proved that the service was in fact uninstalled properly,

however the VM needed a reboot before the service in question would be

taken off the services list. So no alarm here.

3) Oracle home folder clean-up

I noticed there were some left over files and folders under D:app folder, I deleted them all.

4) Program Files clean-up

By just implementing the three above steps, the problem still did not go

away. I attempted yet another installation and it failed with the same

error message. So I immediately knew that if the registry, windows

services and client folders were already cleaned up, the problem then

forcefully had to reside with the Oracle app folder. It just made

sense… The elimination process.

I deleted everything under “C:Program Files (x86)Oracle".

That did the trick and I was able to run a successful installation

afterwards. The VM has been working without an associated bug ever

since.

Written by Ramin Haghighat