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I have a big Installshield 2010 Basic MSI project that creates an executable installer.

I would like to make this Installer run silently, but the supposed built-in /S and /SMS options don't appear to work. I figure I have to explicitly handle it within the .ISM itself, but don't know how, and so far my Googling has only returned help with things like SilentReadData() and SilentWriteData for InstallShield Scripts. (See http://kb.flexerasoftware.com/doc/Helpnet/installshield15langref/LangrefSilentReadData.htm) I don't think this is the right way to go, as I have no scripting currently in my .ISM file.

  1. What other information do you need to know to help me?
  2. Can someone point me in the right direction?

Running on Windows 7, creating an installer for a 32-bit executable targeting X86.

kmort
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1 Answers1

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If you're using an InstallScript UI (common to the InstallScript and InstallScript MSI project types), any custom dialogs need to have SilentReadData and SilentWriteData calls (conditioned on MODE) like you found. However if you have no script at all, you are probably using a Basic MSI project instead. For these, you need a different command-line parameter to make it silent, such as /v"/qb" or /v"/qn"; you may also need to provide some property definitions for any non-default settings, in the format /v"/qb PROPERTY=\"Value\"".

Michael Urman
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  • I tried both `/v" /qb"` and `/v" /qn"` to no avail. Both syntaxes spun up the GUI. Note that my InstallShield module doesn't have any custom dialogs (that I'm aware of), and has nothing where you have to select options. There's just the default "Hi, welcome to installing product xyz" and "click next to continue." I think because there's nothing to select, `-r` doesn't record an answer file. Do I have to do anything special to get the silent option to work, or should that just work out of the box with a default project? – kmort Sep 26 '13 at 20:29
  • Since it is an InstallShield Basic MSI, I had to use `/v" /qn"` as command line arguments, as Michael Urman stated above. I had tried that before, but not **Running as Administrator**. This made all the difference. You can use `/l* file.txt` to log output for your install. When I did that, it showed lack of permissions to complete the installation. The final, functional syntax (with administrator permissions) was `setup.exe /s /v" /qn /l* log.txt"`. The first `/s` suppressed the "Preparing to Install" dialog. The rest was sent to `MSIExec` and controlled how that ran. – kmort Sep 27 '13 at 19:51