rtoolsinstallerror.md

A friend is trying to get Rtools installed correctly on her windows machine. It seems to install fine, but then at the end, she gets an error. The error below shows up in the Rtools installation wizard, and it suggest a permissions problem.

This is the error when trying to isntall Rtools on her machine

C:\Users\Chris\Documents\R\Rtools\gcc-4.6.3

Error creating registry key:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session
Manager\Environment

RegCreateKeyEx failed; code 5
Access is denied.

Click Retry to try again, Ignore to proceed anyway, or Abort to cancel
installation.

Any ideas? Do you think this is the solution: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/327507

I believe this error occurs when Rtools tries to add gcc to the system-wide $PATH, which requires admin rights. My suggestion is to ignore to proceed anyway, and then modify the user $PATH later. You can access the user environment variables in Control Panel > Advanced System Settings > Advanced Tab > Environment Variables.

You'll want to add C:\Users\Chris\Documents\R\Rtools\gcc-4.6.3\bin to the path.

PS. you may get similar errors later on when other things need to be added to the path.
PPS. According to https://github.com/stan-dev/rstan/wiki/Install-Rtools-for-Windows, you need to add

C:\Users\Chris\Documents\R\Rtools\bin; C:\Users\Chris\Documents\R\Rtools\gcc-4.6.3\bin

To the beginning of the Path variable .

Looks more like a registry access problem to me - I think it's better to get that working correctly, then rely on RStudio/devtools to set the path dynamically when needed. That's less likely to cause clashes with multiple installed tools.

Hi Sckott,

I also receive this error message when trying to install Rtools on my work machine. Did your friend manage to find a solution?

Thanks,
Tom