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ElShang's avatar
ElShang
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1 month ago

Quartus Prime 25.1 installation issue

Hello to the community. I had some problems while installing Quartus Prime. Though in the end I finally succeeded, maybe someone will point out what I've done wrong. Here are the steps: I started...
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Installation & Licensing
ElShang's avatar
ElShang
Icon for New Contributor rankNew Contributor
1 month ago

Thanks for reply.

Here are answers to your questions:

  • Your system RAM size — 16GB;
  • Available disk space — total size ~230 GB, after Quartus installation still 120GB free;
  • Approximately how long you wait when the installer shows “Not Responding” before manually terminating it — around 5 minutes, give or take.

 

>>In some cases, the .tar-based installer can take a longer time to unpack and complete, depending on system performance and storage speed. Even when the UI appears unresponsive, background installation processes may still be running.

Well, that might be true, of course. I checked for the background activity using the Task Manager, and there was nothing there consuming even a few percent of the CPU.

>>In general, I would recommend using the Quartus installer instead. This installer allows you to select only the components you need and auto install. 

Gave it a try also. And immediately met the issue you mentioned below. :-D Quite discouraging!

==========

Also, one more "symptom" I forgot to mention. Every time setup became unresponsive and forcefully terminated, I, of course, had to delete all the garbage before attempting once again. Window's "Add or remove programs" did not mention any Altera or Quartus-related stuff there, so I did the following:

  1. Went directly to the installation directory.
  2. Found an "uninstall" directory, and there was only the help uninstaller .
  3. Executed it, and it completed fine.
  4. Next I tried to manually delete the installation directory, and it failed, reporting that there is a process currently using it.
  5. To fulfill this step I had to reboot the PC completely.

Maybe it may be a hint, I don't know.

=========

>>Below are standard troubleshooting steps I usually suggest, which may help identify or resolve the issue

Ok, I will take your recommendations into account in the future.

RichardT_altera's avatar
RichardT_altera
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1 month ago

Hi ElShang,

Thanks for the detailed update and for sharing your system info — that really helps.
Based on what you’ve described, your setup (16 GB RAM, plenty of disk space, supported Windows 10 version) looks perfectly fine, so this doesn’t appear to be a system limitation issue.

The installer UI can look frozen even though things may still be happening in the background. 
If the installer gets force‑closed while it’s in this state, Windows may keep file handles open, which would explain why:
-The install directory couldn’t be deleted
-A full reboot was needed to clean things up

I believe you handled the cleanup the right way. When an install doesn’t finish cleanly, it’s expected that nothing shows up in “Add or Remove Programs.” The directory lock strongly suggests something was still running behind the scenes when the installer was terminated.

For future installs I’d still recommend using the Quartus online installer when possible. It generally gives better progress feedback and avoids a lot of this hanging behavior. You hit the SSL issue right away (unfortunate timing!), but once that’s addressed using the KDB steps, the online installer should be much smoother overall.

Thanks again for sticking with it and for sharing such a clear write‑up. If you run into any issues now that Quartus is installed and running, feel free to let us know.

Regards,
Richard Tan