EOS ERR 1603 epic games online installer

If you have the Epic Games Launcher installed in a drive other than C:\ you can create a symbolic directory link in C:\Program Files (x86)\Epic Games that points to the drive/directory you have the launcher installed. I used powershell to do this (do a web search for New-SymLink, I'm sure there are a few out there but I grabbed the function from the Powershell Gallery site - copy it to PS ISE, run once to load in memory then function will be usable) though you could just as easily use the command line built into windows, mklink. This in essence "tricks" the Epic installers into thinking your launcher is installed where they seem to expect it while simply redirecting the I/O to the actual install location. Symbolic links do not take up any space so this will not cause any additional consumption of space on your C: drive.

The reason I opted for this as opposed to other suggested solutions/workarounds is that this isn't the first time I've encountered a quirk with one of their installers with an odd affinity to drive C:. This way should the Epic Launcher programmers make a mistake like this again in the future then you are already covered.

(in my case Epic Games Launcher is installed on drive E:) - do this with Powershell or Command Prompt run as admin, otherwise unless you have disabled User Account Control neither will have enough privileges to create symbolic links.

Powershell syntax :

New-SymLink -Path "E:\Program Files (x86)\Epic Games" -SymName "C:\Program Files (x86)\Epic Games" -Directory

Command Line syntax:

mklink /D "C:\Program Files (x86)\Epic Games" "E:\Program Files (x86)\Epic Game"

In the future should you decide to remove the symbolic link for any reason you can delete it from explorer like you would any other shortcut (which is how this will show up); it will not delete any content from the target (actual) installation path.

This is the right answer. Just create the following folder and try again

> C:\Program Files (x86)\Epic Games

Hi @SuperMario_48 

It does unfortunately get installed into "C:\Program Files (x86)\Epic Games\Epic Online Services" with my solution but it is quite small (about 27Mb) and for me of no consequence.

Nothing like the huge install the is VaultCache etc.. :)

Hi everyone,

thx for all the answers.

So it seems like, that this is a EpicGames and not a Microsoft problem. I have not tested the solutions so far, but installing the Launcher on C isn´t an option for me in any way, so im going to contact the Epic-Support about this and i will reference to this thread so they see, that this is not a windows problem. As soon as i get an answer, i will post it here.

Best regards

Same exact issue and upon running the .exe file manually I got the could not access network location which to me suggests something's wrong with the location of whatever it's trying to download and has nothing to do with .net which is rather funny to me as both Epic games and Microsoft, 2 rather large software companies, both seem to blame the same thing which I don't really think is the issue.