Fixing installation or licensing 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 install

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 rest of the process. Default installation process shown.

1. Delete all of the "Lumerical preference.ini" files including the "License.ini" file from your computer. Open a windows command prompt and run the following:

   cd %AppData%\Lumerical
   del *.ini  

2. Reboot the computer.
3. Uninstall the Optics Product' applications from your computer.

4. Delete the installation folder. Open Windows File Explorer and go to:

   C:\Program Files\{Optics Product}\ 

   and removed the installed version's directory. e.g. example shows path for [[ver]].

    rmdir /S "C:\Program Files\Lumerical\[[verpath]]"

5. For installations using the Ansys automated installer, remove the 'Optics Product' folder from the "Ansys Inc" installed version's directory:

   rmdir /S "C:\Program Files\Ansys Inc\<version>\{Optics Product}"

6. Reboot your computer and install the latest release of the Optics product application.

Linux 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 rest of the process. Default installation process shown.

1. Delete all of the "Lumerical preference.ini" files from your computer.

   rm ~/.config/Lumerical/*.ini 
   or
   rm $HOME/.config/Lumerical/*.ini 

2. Remove 'Lumerical' from your machine using yum. 

   sudo yum autoremove Lumerical-[[ver]]

3. Delete the installation folder.

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

4. Install Lumerical.

See also

Ansys Lumerical product preference files

Windows installation guide  

RHEL/Rocky Linux installation guide  

Ubuntu Linux installation guide  

SUSE Linux Enterprise Server installation guide