Failed to install Tomcat service: solved

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I spent about a frustrating half-hour solving this one. Tomcat 5 has such a nice Windows installer, and good integration with Windows services, so I hate to rag on it. But for such a common situation, it seems this is a vast oversight in the Windows Tomcat installation program.

The problem was with installing Tomcat 5.5.9 on a Windows XP system. I'd run the Windows installer and get this error dialog: 
Failed to install tomcat 5 service
Check your settings and permissions
Abort Retry Ignore
The above is accompanied by a warning to select Ignore at your own peril. I googled around and none of the suggestions worked. The most common situation that results in that error is not being logged in with administrative privileges, since the Windows installer installs Tomcat as a service. That wasn't my problem. My login privileges was the first thing I checked after the "check your settings and permissions" message. I even checked the Tomcat bugzilla site and got the "Zarro Boogs found" when looking for my particular problem.

It seems the problem was having Tomcat 5.0 installed on the box. It appears that the 5.5.9 installer tries to install Tomcat as a service using the same service name, and gets an error from Windows that a service with that name exists. Either that, or the installer tries to create a Windows registry key that already was in use by Tomcat 5.0. At least these are my guesses, because uninstalling Tomcat 5.0 made the 5.5.9 installer happy. After the Tomcat 5.0 uninstall, everything worked OK.

It seems too bad I can't have both versions installed at the same time, at least by using the Windows installer.

7 thoughts on “Failed to install Tomcat service: solved”

  1. I am also receiving the same error message:
    “Failed to install Tomcat 5 service
    Check your settings and permissions
    Ignore and continue anyway (not recommended)”
    This message comes up while the installer is
    installing the jvm.dll from the JRE_HOME/bin/client/ dir.
    I tried changing the JRE home path to JAVA_HOME/ and again
    to JAVA_HOME/JRE I got the same error except it came up when
    trying to install the jvm.dll from the JAVA_HOME/JRE/bin/server/
    dir. I checked to make sure the dll files existed and they do.
    I am using windows XP and I can compile and run java programs. Does anyone know of a solution to this problem?

  2. I tried all the fixes above and still cannot get tomcat to start as a service. There is no other version of tomcat running. Any other suggestions?

  3. I’m also getting this problem. “Failed to Install TomCat5 Service”. I am an admin on the box. I have both the jre and the jdk installed and tried pointing to both. I have the jvm.dll file and it also dies at that point. I don’t have another version of Tomcat installed. Anyone figure this out yet? I installed this on another server and had no problems at all.

  4. Thank you Ab, this solved the problem for me too. The installer did’nt like my default TMP environnement variable on windows 2000. I simplified it and everything was OK.

  5. Same problem, and your tips saved me repeating the hours and days to find a solution. THANKS!!!

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