Wednesday, July 11, 2012

Troubleshooting A Failing MSI Install

So I was installing an application the other day when I got the following error message:

The installer was interrupted before Application could be installed. You need to restart the installer to try again.
Click "Close" to exit.

Not very helpful huh? Luckily there’s a way to get more information. It involves running the msiexec command explicitly so that it generates a logfile with more details on how the execution failed. The command looks like this:

msiexec /package <package.msi>" /l*vx "c:\setup.log"

The /l switch tells msiexec to log installation information to the logfile specified. A lot of information can get piped into this logfile but nonetheless its a handy way to find out what’s happening inside the installation process.

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