Removing hard drive causes issues with uninstall

Devinr · Post by **Devinr** » Thu Sep 10, 2009 5:23 am

We have found that when installing our project onto a computer there is no restriction from installing onto a removable hard drive.

If the users chooses to remove that drive the uninstall will no longer work, preventing any further installation onto the computer. This issue also plagues a user who installs on a valid internal drive but then removes or changes the drive letter for that drive.

Are there any solutions available to prevent the user from installing on an easily removable drive? Or more importantly, is there a way to fix the un-installer so that it will remove the remnants of the project should this issue occur, thus allowing for re-install?

neillans · Post by **neillans** » Thu Sep 10, 2009 11:38 am

The most immediate thing that I can think of is to add a call to the windows function that lets you identify a drive -- that will let you add MSI Code to prevent the user from continuing the installation process if they have selected a non fixed drive ...

Devinr · Post by **Devinr** » Thu Sep 10, 2009 9:03 pm

Thanks for your response, although we are a little uncertain how to go about doing this within the context of InstallAware. We are looking into it now (but any further assistance from this forum would be greatly advantageous).

But, can any further insight be offered into the second portion of this issue? Whereby, uninstall can fail if the installed media is unfindable.

This issue is particularly important, because it prevents the user from re-installing the project on their PC, without having to deal with cleaning their registry manually.