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I've just inherited an InstallShield 2009 project from a guy who left (oh joy) and am trying to get the setup.exe to run in silent mode. The project is a Basic MSI project and according to the documentation, I should be able to specify the /s switch combined with /v/qn to make the installer and MSI process silent. However, when I do this, the process shows all the dialogs as normal. I've tried generating an answer file with the /r switch, but this fails to produce any sign of a setup.iss any where (I checked the windows folder, which is where it apparently goes).

Why would the process be ignoring the silent commands? I can see nothing in the install log that indicates a problem... The command line I am using is this:

setup.exe /s /v/qn

I've tried various combinations of lower and uppercase to no avail. Any advice would be appreciated.

Steve

Edit:

I've also tried:

setup.exe /s /v"/qn"

Which did not work also.

Edit 2:

It might be worth pointing out that the installer is performing and upgrade from a previous version of the product to a newer version. The first dialog that pops up is the "extracting msi" dialog followed by the "welcome to upgrade" dialog.

ChrisF
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Steve Whitfield
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2 Answers2

5

The following should work for InstallShield 9:

Setup.exe /s /V/qn

If you want to send commands to the MSI, do the following:

Setup.exe /s /V"/qn ADDLOCAL=ALL"

NOTE: The v is capitalized. Some versions of InstallShield use lowercase and others use Uppercase for v.

Max Shmelev
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Jon Papageorgiou
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Try

setup.exe /s /v"/qn"

Basically /s is to tell setup.exe to run silent and /v is to pass parms to MSI so you have to wrap it in quotes. /qn tells MSI to run with no UI.

Setup.exe and Update.exe Command-Line Parameters

The Command-Line Options for the Microsoft Windows Installer Tool Msiexec.exe

Christopher Painter
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  • Thanks for the response. I tried this and it was ignored too. I omitted the quotes initially because the InstallShield documentation says you don't need the quotes if the argument does not contain spaces. But even with quotes it does nothing. – Steve Whitfield Oct 26 '10 at 09:41
  • Is there anything in the .ism project that could affect this kind of thing? – Steve Whitfield Oct 26 '10 at 09:47
  • I suppose it's possible that setup.exe is overridding the parms being passed into MSI. I've never seen this before though. Enable Windows Installer Logging with: setup.exe /s /v"/qn /l*v setup.log" If that doesn't work follow the insructions at http://support.microsoft.com/kb/223300 – Christopher Painter Oct 26 '10 at 11:20
  • When you get a log, look for Original CommandLine (Command Line?) It's been awhile but it'll show you how it's being invoked. You can also run cmd | wmic | path win32_process to see the switches setup.exe passed to msiexec ( there may be up to 3 msiexec's you are looking for the client side process ) – Christopher Painter Oct 26 '10 at 11:22
  • Couldn't get the setup.log to appear so I'm using the voicewarmupx registry key. The MSI Log for my most recent attempt dumped this out: MSI (c) (A8:80) [11:13:27:700]: ******* RunEngine: ******* Product: C:\...[snipped]..\Install.msi ******* Action: ******* CommandLine: ********** So no command line. – Steve Whitfield Oct 27 '10 at 10:23
  • I also used wmic to check the MSI args while it was running, there were two instances of msiexec each without any arguments displayed. I've checked some of previous installers for this product and a branch 2 versions old has no problem with the silent parameters, but all subsequent releases seem to ignore them, so I guess something has screwed up the project in later versions, but I can't see what it would be. – Steve Whitfield Oct 27 '10 at 10:29
  • I'd have to get the package in my lab environment and study it to get a complete understanding of the problem. sorry. – Christopher Painter Oct 27 '10 at 12:33