Fixing installation or license activation issues

Installation of a new version of Ansys Lumerical should automatically uninstall any prior versions on your computer when the option to uninstall is selected during the installation process without manually uninstalling the older version first. However, in some cases, the automatic un-install fails, resulting in one of the following errors after the installation.

• Activation failed with error code # -
• Error: There was a problem loading the activation library. Code #
• Internal error: -178

Try to resolve the above by doing a "clean installation" of Lumerical as shown below.

Requisites

• Admin or root privileges on the local computer.
• Lumerical installation package of the version to be installed.

Windows clean installation

Close the error message and any running Lumerical simulation/application. If possible reboot the computer. Do step #1 below. If this does not resolve the issue, continue with the 2nd process. 

1. Remove the "Lumerical product preference.ini" files as shown here. If you are having issues with the license configuration, delete all preference.ini files including the "License.ini" file from your computer. 
   
   
2. Uninstall all 'Lumerical or Ansys Lumerical' applications from 'Windows Control Panel > Programs and Features'. Delete the installation folder. Go to 'C:\Program Files\Lumerical\' and ensure the 'version' folder (e.g. previous versions and current '[[verpath]]' folders) are removed. If these folders are present, delete them. Install Lumerical simulation suite for Windows.

Linux clean installation

Close the error message and any running Lumerical simulation/application. Do step #1 below. If this does not resolve the issue, continue with the 2nd process. 

1. Open Terminal. Remove the "Lumerical product preference.ini" files as shown here. If you are having issues with the license configuration, delete all preference.ini files including the "License.ini" file from your computer. 
2. Remove 'Lumerical' from your machine using yum. Example shows Lumerical [[ver]].

   sudo yum remove Lumerical-[[ver]]

   Delete the installation folder.

    sudo rm -R /opt/lumerical/[[verpath]]

   Install Lumerical simulation suite on Linux.

See also

Windows installation guide  

RHEL/CentOS Linux installation guide  

Ubuntu Linux installation guide  

SUSE Linux Enterprise Server installation guide