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Visual Studio 2012: "The event log file is full" error message

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I installed Visual Studio 2012 Professional. The installation did not complete successfully so I ran a Repair. During the Repair, the following error occurred:

The event log file is full

 

Thanks to a StackOverflow post, (which I'm not finding today), the following steps resolved the issue:

1. In Control Panel, uninstall Visual Studio 2012.

2. On Visual Studio 2012 computer: Delete all the files in %ProgramData%\Package Cache. To open this folder, open the Run window, and type: %ProgramData%\Package Cache. On Windows 8, the ProgramData folder is hidden.

On Visual Studio 2013 and newer versions, based on your comments, move the files from Package Cache to a different folder (do not delete). After your successful install, move the files back into Package Cache.

3. Forcibly remove Visual Studio 2012:

a) Open the command window as Administrator.

b) Type:"drive:\\InstallPath\vs_professional.exe" /uninstall /force

c) Hit Enter.

 

4. Ran the Visual Studio setup again. Success.

 

This article lists the /force option:

How to uninstall Visual Studio 2012
https://support.microsoft.com/kb/2771441/en-us#Force

 

Thanks!

1/16/18 update: Updated step 2 to include details for VS2013 and newer versions (based on blog comments)

Comments

  • Anonymous
    January 15, 2014
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    April 09, 2014
    This work perfectly, now it has fixed other issues I had creating new ASP.NET MVC 4/5 projects

  • Anonymous
    July 21, 2014
    Thanks a lot. Your recipe helped me with severe problems where VS omitted parts of the installation.

  • Anonymous
    October 23, 2014
    thanks for the valuable suggestion..it solved my frustration..

  • Anonymous
    January 20, 2015
    Thanks for the fix, exact same problem!

  • Anonymous
    March 21, 2015
    Thanks for this, your steps fixed a problem I've been having for some time!

  • Anonymous
    October 15, 2015
    Hi Mandi. This worked for me too. The issue I was getting SSIS issues - Element <GUID here> does not exist in collection "Executables" intermittently on packages that had not changed. This seems to have solved it, thank you.

  • Anonymous
    March 09, 2016
    This fixed my VS2012 issue but it royally messed up my VS2015 install.  Fortunately I didn't delete the data in package cache, I just moved it somewhere else.  Once I moved it back my VS2015 install is good again.

    • Anonymous
      March 23, 2016
      Charles - Thank you for the input. So, you moved the files from PackageCache. Did the rest of the steps work for Visual Studio 2015?
      • Anonymous
        November 27, 2017
        My VS Studio projects no longer opened. I ran Repair and at the end got a message saying repair had failed and that the Event Log file was full and that I would need to reinstall. I did not re-install but just took your suggestion of deleting the files from the Program Cache directory. My projects now open fine.Thanks

  • Anonymous
    September 13, 2017
    All I had to do was uninstall it and delete the cache and it worked for me! Thanks! I couldn't start my homework without this lol

  • Anonymous
    January 05, 2018
    BEWARE! This is extremely bad fix tutorial because of the point 2. DO NOT DELETE CACHE FOLDER!If you delete all files in %ProgramData%\Package Cache, then you literally loose almost every installer on the system (not only vs_professional.exe). So it will destroy everything else (vs 2015, 17, SQL express, ...) everything which has been cached. You can clearly see it in the 'add or remove programs' settings, when you try to remove/modify anything and it shows error, that it is not in the Package Cache folder. Not mentioning the fact, that due to point 2 you wont be able to do point 3 b), because vs_professional.exe was in the Cache folder.