Oracle 12c Installation failed to access the temporary location

Question

I have Windows 8.1 64-bit OS running on 64-bit architecture. I am installing a fresh copy of Oracle 12C, means I haven\'t installed any version before on my system.

Answer 1

Summarized: Oracle under Windows has problems with usernames containing non-English letters or special characters:

If your machine is fresh installed, first look here. All the network related or 32 vs. 64 related issues may be not significant for you:

As others already pointed out partly, this error is highly related to the name of the TEMP dir. It occurred to me when installing Oracle 11g first time on a totally fresh Windows (e.g. Server 2008 R2 or Win 7, not important).

As I found out, on my machine the problem was, that the username contained a German special character ("ö"). Moreover Oracle cannot handle any special character, I assume, the TEMP path is limited to letters. Other colleagues here have reported problems with underscore and chinese characters.

Explanation: In Windows the TEMP dir (environment variable %TEMP%) is by default in the user directory, for example:

C:\Users\ThisUser\AppData\Local\Temp

If "ThisUser" contains special or non-ASCII characters, then in this case this affects the TEMP path, and that is where Oracle is gettings problems.

Setting the TEMP dir to different directory is of course another possibility instead of installing with another username.

Moreover, Oracle is not a fully native Windows citizen which everybody will recognize, if he opens the Oracle install logfile with notepad ;-) Obviously, this is not programmed cleanly and portable, e.g. with using "std::endl" instead of "\n" . (Yes, Notepad++ and other editors do the job.)

Overall, my impression is, if the database were of the same quality as it's installer, Oracle would not be so successful ..

Last remark: Yes, after failed install because of the special characters you see only one Oracle service named OracleRemExecService, but there is no reason to stop this manually as recommended in other solutions, if you are able to install again a fresh OS..