Software Deployment

The MSI will return an exit code that requests a reboot. Check for 3010.

check the EventViewer, if the installation requires REBOOT. The respective entry will be added to EventViewer.

You may find this utility useful to find out why you need to reboot:
http://exodusdev.com/products/whyreboot

Maybe it's just me but I've never found that tool to be any good.. it always just says:

"No items were found.

NOTE that this does not mean that you don't need to reboot your computer, rather, WhyReboot was unable to detect any pending file operations."

Talk about coving the bases [8D]

You'll find it a lot more productive to try and eliminate reboots in the first place. There is a very limited set of circumstances which actually require a reboot. Vendor MSIs typically trigger a reboot as a fail-safe or because their packager was too stupid to work out a way to avoid it.

in your vendor supplied msi look at the sequence tables ie installexecutesequence and UI sequence tables but obviously you will not be deploying with full UI)

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager]
"PendingFileRenameOperations"=hex(7):(value in hex)

This key will contains information what file(s) needs to be copied at the next reboot. After the reboot, the key is deleted.


There's also this when you install a Microsoft Patch :

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager]
"SetupExecute"=hex(7):(value in hex)

The value indicated what command to execute at shutdown/reboot. Also, the file C:\Windows\winsxs\pending.xml is created.
After the reboot, the value of "SetupExecute" and pending.xml is deleted.

If you want to nag the user who reboot once a month, google search : GracefuLReboot.vbs

If you install the MSIs through your exe then just take care of the return code which TK posted.

You might also want to look for the exit code 1641. This is the code that will be returned if the MSI forces a reboot.

I think we scared him off. Are we TOO helpful?

Good catch Michael however; wouldn't that be too late for the "tool" to take care of it?

Nope, I've been running a few scripts (Wisescripts and VBS) that are able to catch the exit code and write them to a log file before the system reboots.

Cool, but I was talking about letting the "tool" handle the reboot instead if it was to allow more installations after the forced reboot install.