Software Deployment

I have never been successful doing a REINSTALL with a new transform. Patch yes, but not with a transform. Let me know if you are successful. Otherwise, I've always had to do an uninstall/reinstall cycle.

William

ORIGINAL: frodo

hi all,
i have deployed an vendor msi with an mst we created.
we have made updates to the mst and need to re-deploy it.
what is the best approach\command line to use to ensure that the new mst gets installed?
for example command line used to install was
msiexec /i vendorapp.msi transforsm="transformV1.mst" /qb!

now that we have created transformV2.mst what cmd line do we use to update with new transform?

all ideas welcome

so your saying i need to run 2 sms jobs, one to uninstall the installed package and one to install my new shiney mst?

is upgrading an option here?

i cant believe that REINSTALL does not work! weird!

One of the problems you face is that the newer transform would not be cached even if you used the 'v' switch in the REINSTALLMODE property. This is just a restriction in the way reinstalls happen to work.

You might be able to get around this by using the Platform SDK script WiUseXfm.vbs to combine your new transform with the base MSI to end up with a single (transformed) MSI (ORCA has the "Save Transformed As" option to do pretty much the same thing, BTW).

Once you have the transformed MSI this could be use on it's own in a reinstall operation.

If you have added any new components in the later transform, these should have been added into a new feature and then your reinstall command would look something like :

msiexec / i <Name of Transformed MSI> REINSTALL=<comma delimited list of original features to install> REINSTALLMODE=vomus ADDLOCAL=<comma delimited list of new features that your newer transform adds>

If there were no additional components added and you just made very minor amendments in the newer transform, you might be able to get away with using REINSTALL=ALL - you'd need to try this out to be sure though [:)] In this case, the command would look something like

msiexec / i <Name of Transformed MSI> REINSTALL=ALL REINSTALLMODE=vomus

Regards,

Spartacus