R install.packages returns 'ERROR: failed to lock directory'

Question

[Similar question to 14382209 but suggestions there haven't solved this issue]

New installation of R 4.0.0 and tidyverse on a Windows 7 work computer returns this classic failed to create lock directory error

 install.packages('tidyverse')
WARNING: Rtools is required to build R packages but is not currently installed. Please download and install the appropriate version of Rtools before proceeding:

https://cran.rstudio.com/bin/windows/Rtools/
Installing package into ‘\\ukbia04sfsrv002.a04.dt21.svcs.hp.com/users/A04/ocarrib/R/win-library/4.0’
(as ‘lib’ is unspecified)
also installing the dependencies ‘highr’, ‘markdown’, ‘testthat’, ‘RColorBrewer’, ‘viridisLite’, ‘askpass’, ‘rematch’, ‘prettyunits’, ‘processx’, ‘knitr’, ‘yaml’, ‘htmltools’, ‘evaluate’, ‘base64enc’, ‘tinytex’, ‘xfun’, ‘backports’, ‘generics’, ‘reshape2’, ‘assertthat’, ‘glue’, ‘fansi’, ‘DBI’, ‘lifecycle’, ‘R6’, ‘tidyselect’, ‘ellipsis’, ‘pkgconfig’, ‘Rcpp’, ‘BH’, ‘plogr’, ‘digest’, ‘gtable’, ‘isoband’, ‘scales’, ‘withr’, ‘vctrs’, ‘curl’, ‘mime’, ‘openssl’, ‘utf8’, ‘clipr’, ‘cellranger’, ‘progress’, ‘callr’, ‘fs’, ‘rmarkdown’, ‘whisker’, ‘selectr’, ‘stringi’, ‘broom’, ‘cli’, ‘crayon’, ‘dbplyr’, ‘dplyr’, ‘forcats’, ‘ggplot2’, ‘haven’, ‘hms’, ‘httr’, ‘jsonlite’, ‘lubridate’, ‘magrittr’, ‘modelr’, ‘pillar’, ‘purrr’, ‘readr’, ‘readxl’, ‘reprex’, ‘rlang’, ‘rstudioapi’, ‘rvest’, ‘stringr’, ‘tibble’, ‘tidyr’, ‘xml2’


  There are binary versions available but the source versions are later:
       binary source needs_compilation
modelr  0.1.6  0.1.7             FALSE
xml2    1.3.1  1.3.2              TRUE

  Binaries will be installed
trying URL 'https://cran.rstudio.com/bin/windows/contrib/4.0/highr_0.8.zip'
Content type 'application/zip' length 48579 bytes (47 KB)
downloaded 47 KB

# .... Output edited for brevity #

trying URL 'https://cran.rstudio.com/bin/windows/contrib/4.0/tidyverse_1.3.0.zip'
Content type 'application/zip' length 440009 bytes (429 KB)
downloaded 429 KB

package ‘highr’ successfully unpacked and MD5 sums checked
Error in install.packages : ERROR: failed to lock directory ‘\\ukbia04sfsrv002.a04.dt21.svcs.hp.com\users\A04\ocarrib\R\win-library\4.0’ for modifying
Try removing ‘\\ukbia04sfsrv002.a04.dt21.svcs.hp.com\users\A04\ocarrib\R\win-library\4.0/00LOCK’

Then trialling rtools

 install.packages('rtools')
WARNING: Rtools is required to build R packages but is not currently installed. Please download and install the appropriate version of Rtools before proceeding:

https://cran.rstudio.com/bin/windows/Rtools/
Installing package into ‘\\ukbia04sfsrv002.a04.dt21.svcs.hp.com/users/A04/ocarrib/R/win-library/4.0’
(as ‘lib’ is unspecified)
Warning in install.packages :
  package ‘rtools’ is not available (for R version 4.0.0)

Then trialled: - Deletion 00lock folder directly from stated location (~A04\ocarrib\R\win-library\4.0/00LOCK) - restarting R - No luck, same error

Then trialled with options:

> install.packages("tidyverse", dependencies = TRUE, INSTALL_opts = '--no-lock')
WARNING: Rtools is required to build R packages but is not currently installed. Please download and install the appropriate version of Rtools before proceeding:

https://cran.rstudio.com/bin/windows/Rtools/
Installing package into ‘\\ukbia04sfsrv002.a04.dt21.svcs.hp.com/users/A04/ocarrib/R/win-library/4.0’
(as ‘lib’ is unspecified)
also installing the dependencies ‘RColorBrewer’, ‘viridisLite’, ‘askpass’, ‘rematch’, ‘prettyunits’, ‘processx’, ‘lazyeval’, ‘backports’, ‘generics’, ‘reshape2’, ‘assertthat’, ‘fansi’, ‘DBI’, ‘lifecycle’, ‘R6’, ‘tidyselect’, ‘ellipsis’, ‘pkgconfig’, ‘Rcpp’, ‘BH’, ‘plogr’, ‘digest’, ‘gtable’, ‘isoband’, ‘scales’, ‘withr’, ‘vctrs’, ‘curl’, ‘mime’, ‘openssl’, ‘utf8’, ‘clipr’, ‘cellranger’, ‘progress’, ‘callr’, ‘fs’, ‘whisker’, ‘selectr’, ‘stringi’, ‘rex’, ‘yaml’, ‘evaluate’, ‘highr’, ‘markdown’, ‘xfun’, ‘htmltools’, ‘base64enc’, ‘tinytex’, ‘broom’, ‘cli’, ‘crayon’, ‘dbplyr’, ‘dplyr’, ‘forcats’, ‘ggplot2’, ‘haven’, ‘hms’, ‘httr’, ‘jsonlite’, ‘lubridate’, ‘magrittr’, ‘modelr’, ‘pillar’, ‘purrr’, ‘readr’, ‘readxl’, ‘reprex’, ‘rlang’, ‘rstudioapi’, ‘rvest’, ‘stringr’, ‘tibble’, ‘tidyr’, ‘xml2’, ‘covr’, ‘feather’, ‘glue’, ‘knitr’, ‘rmarkdown’, ‘testthat’


  There are binary versions available but the source versions are later:
       binary source needs_compilation
modelr  0.1.6  0.1.7             FALSE
xml2    1.3.1  1.3.2              TRUE

  Binaries will be installed
trying URL 'https://cran.rstudio.com/bin/windows/contrib/4.0/RColorBrewer_1.1-2.zip'
Content type 'application/zip' length 55583 bytes (54 KB)
downloaded 54 KB

# Output edited for brevity

package ‘RColorBrewer’ successfully unpacked and MD5 sums checked
package ‘viridisLite’ successfully unpacked and MD5 sums checked
package ‘askpass’ successfully unpacked and MD5 sums checked
Error in install.packages : ERROR: failed to lock directory ‘\\ukbia04sfsrv002.a04.dt21.svcs.hp.com\users\A04\ocarrib\R\win-library\4.0’ for modifying
Try removing ‘\\ukbia04sfsrv002.a04.dt21.svcs.hp.com\users\A04\ocarrib\R\win-library\4.0/00LOCK’

Any other thoughts??

Session info:

> sessionInfo()
R version 4.0.0 (2020-04-24)
Platform: x86_64-w64-mingw32/x64 (64-bit)
Running under: Windows 7 x64 (build 7601) Service Pack 1

Matrix products: default

locale:
[1] LC_COLLATE=English_United Kingdom.1252  LC_CTYPE=English_United Kingdom.1252   
[3] LC_MONETARY=English_United Kingdom.1252 LC_NUMERIC=C                           
[5] LC_TIME=English_United Kingdom.1252    

attached base packages:
[1] stats     graphics  grDevices utils     datasets  methods   base     

loaded via a namespace (and not attached):
[1] compiler_4.0.0 tools_4.0.0 

Answer 1

1. Open the R folder (where you first save R after downloading)

2. Remove 00lock folder by changing its place - cut and paste to another place.

3. Try to download the library.