HALion Symphonic Orchestra Content and Installation

Looking for some Assistance with HALion Symphonic Orchestra. Specs: Windows 10, HALion Symphonic Orchestra (VST Sound Instrument Set) 1.2.0, Dorico 1.2.10.139, Cubase 8.5.

Had a hard drive fail and had to move the location of the content for the HSO. Understandably when I open Dorico, I get an error from HALion stating “Some files are missing, please check installation.” I have attempted to find a way to point the VST to where the files have moved to but it seems there is no way to do that within the VST (despite what it says here: https://helpcenter.steinberg.de/hc/en-us/articles/206760630-HALion-Symphonic-Orchestra-Content-Troubleshooting, as it only applies to the DVD version of HSO). Note that the HSO VST itself works fine and will still open in Dorico.

I then tried to uninstall/reinstall HSO using the installer downloaded from the Steinberg website for HSO, however I get an error during the installer process stating “The Folder Path contains an invalid character.” The folder path to where the HSO content is, is just <F:\D Drive\Cubase Content> and I cannot see characters that would be considered invalid other than perhaps the space. Upon proceeding, the installer then shows an error: “HALion Symphonic Orchestra VST Sound Instrument Set removal failed. Fatal Error during installation. Error Code 1603.” A cursory Google of the code shows that it is a generic error Microsoft Installer error.

I have tried moving the folder to a different file path (F:\Cubase Content) and renaming the folder to CubaseContent, however the error message does not change and still refers to . I looked for other folders named this elsewhere on my computer and was unable to locate any other folder with the same name, so I assume the error message is referring to the same folder as the one I have been looking at. I have also tried a clean boot install to no avail.

In summary, it appears that I cannot remove or change the installation in any way and cannot use HSO at all.

Any assistance or suggestions anyone can provide would be wonderful. If this thread is located in the incorrect spot mods, please move.

Thanks.

I received a solution for this from Support (very quickly too!):

  1. Go to the VST Sound folder on your main installation drive. Likely filepath is: C:\Program Data\Steinberg\Content\VST Sound. You will need the ‘View hidden files’ option enabled in Windows Explorer. For me there was also a further sub folder called VST Sound - HSO.

That folders contains a whole heap of shortcuts which pointed to the incorrect place since the content files were moved.

  1. Open a separate folder view and go to installation folder for HSO (which you can download from [url]https://helpcenter.steinberg.de/hc/en-us/articles/206760630-HALion-Symphonic-Orchestra-Content-Troubleshooting[\url]) and into the \Additional Content\VST Sound\ folder. Copy and paste all of these

  2. Copy all of the content files from the installation folder (step 2) to the VST Sound folder (step 1).

This did not fix the Invalid character issue but this works around it and HSO now works.