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Invalid Drive on uninstall

Posted: Tue Jun 14, 2011 11:50 am
by CCRussell
I'm not sure how this happened. A customer installed my product, and they did something incorrectly. They installed it on a mapped drive - but I'm not sure how they got it to work because if I try to install on a mapped drive in MY test system, it won't let me.

In any case, now when they try to UNINSTALL the application, they get a dialog that says "Error Invalid Drive Q:\"

The uninstall won't complete, a repair install gets the same error, they can't install a new copy of the program as it is redirected to the uninstall/repair dialog.

All of the solutions I've found relate to recreating the Q: drive, or deleteing references to an invalid Q: drive in the Registrty. The odd thing here is that "Q:\" is a VALID DRIVE - it still exists. So I can't create it, it is there. And we don't want to delete references to it, as the letter is used in other situations.

Is there a way to specifically delete my files and references to JUST my application, so that we can install it clean?

Re: Invalid Drive on uninstall

Posted: Tue Jun 14, 2011 4:23 pm
by giaviv
Hi,

That is indeed an odd situation! You are right; these problems usually occur when the network drives are disconnected - this is because of a builtin MSI functionality.

That said, please make sure that all drives that were connected during the installation are still connected and available. Consider a reboot.

To avoid these kinds of issues, it is best to use the Native Engine (by setting the NATIVE_ENGINE variable to TRUE in the beginning of the script).

Re: Invalid Drive on uninstall

Posted: Tue Jun 14, 2011 4:31 pm
by CCRussell
We rebooted. I can't change the install on the existing system, I have a customer in this state and I need to fix it FOR THEM.

Re: Invalid Drive on uninstall

Posted: Tue Jun 14, 2011 6:24 pm
by giaviv
I understand.

In that case, what I would recommend doing is using a brute force uninstaller such as Revo Uninstall (they have a free trial version) to completely remove the installation from the target machine.
Then, use the Native Engine and this shouldn't happen again.