Remove orphand installation

[anja_laenge]

Hi,

so one of our customers has installed the software on a network drive.
For some unfortunate reasons the network drive no longer exists.
The uninstallations failed because the installation folder is not found.

He tried to mimic the old situation by creating another network drive with the installation, but that failed.
When he contacted us, I tried

• https://support.microsoft.com/de-de/hel ... or-removed
• rename the uninstall source so when the control panel did not find it, I prompted the question whether to remove the entry with yes
• backuped and removed [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\WOW6432Node\MimarSinan\InstallAware\Ident.Cache\{...}]
• backuped and removed HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\WOW6432Node\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Uninstall\{...}]

I should add that our setup does not offer Repair or ChangeFeatures.


The goal is to enable the customer to work with a correctly installed updatable local version, for which, in my understanding, we need to remove the existing version and reinstall with local targetDir.

Please advice on how to proceed.


Kind regards
Anja

[JohnGaver]

Is it a setup that was installed using the Windows Installer engine?

If so, the best thing to do would be to use msizap and nuke traces of the product from the registry.

[anja_laenge]

Hi,

thank you for pointing out msizap. It seems to be very powerful.

My problem is:
There is no official download for it; I can't ask customers to install the SDK themselves, and I can't copy files from an obscure source during remote maintenance. Is there another option?

Like a third-party tool, the customer can download and have approved by his IT department, that can execute the same task?

Or a commandline call to the setup that performs a changeFeature installation to a local path without cancelling because of the missing network drive?

kind regards
Anja

[JohnGaver]

I'm afraid not.

The best thing is probably going to be for you to provide them with an InstallAware program that calls msizap, to make it easy for your client to use.

Windows Installer technology is inherently brittle and can often back itself into a corner, which is why Microsoft released tools like msizap - and we embraced and extended brittle Windows Installer with our Native Code Setup Engine - now fully Multi Platform, as you may already know (with macOS, Linux, and Windows native code IDEs, command line compilers, Dialog Designers, Setup Capture, setup engines).