Extract Files from an MSI Installer without a full install

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Have you ever wanted to get at some assemblies in an .NET MSI installer, but you either didn't want to do a full install, or there is some condition in the MSI Installer that doesn't let you install it (such as, you need such and such program, version X, and you do not have it on your machine)?

You can do an Administrative installation using MSIEXEC.EXE and the /a command - line switch:

The administrative installation runs only basic actions like InstallFiles in the AdminExecuteSequence table.

You cam also run this, passing the command to start /wait which will block until msiexec.exe completes and returns:

start /wait msiexec /a product.msi TARGETDIR="%TMP%\Product" /qn

Ah! Now I can fire up Reflector and look inside those little boogers!

N.B. A commenter mentions "LessMSIrables" a tool to extract files from MSI's. Here is the actual link:

http://blogs.pingpoet.com/overflow/archive/2005/06/02/2449.aspx
Peter has been active on the C# and other MS newsgroups, has had samples at gotdotnet.com (now codegallery.com) that have been downloaded over 56,000 times, and has written numerous articles for eggheadcafe.com, for which he is a co-founder, and MSDNAA sites. He has also been a technical reviewer on books from Prentice Hall, Manning and other publishers. Peter was a Microsoft MVP for 10 years. Peter was born and raised in New York City, and after a stint as a jazz musician playing contrabass with the Robert Hunt Trio, migrated to sunny Florida, where he was hired as a rookie Financial Consultant at Merrill Lynch in Orlando, specializing in Corporate Services. It was at Merrill that Peter realized computers and technology were his forte. He spent his last few years at Merrill developing real – time computerized trading and and stock charting program using advanced technical analysis indicators, some of which are his own inventions. In 1997, he moved on to architect and serve as lead developer on a number of innovative web-based and middleware solutions for the healthcare and financial services industry.

Comments

  1. Anonymous4:01 AM

    Have you seen the utility "LessMSIerables" (Google to find it)? A cool tool to let you browse and extract contents of MSI files.

    ReplyDelete
  2. peterbromberg5:31 PM

    Thanks for the info. I'll update the post with a link, since this comments thing mangles long urls.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Anonymous11:56 AM

    Can anyone upload "LessMSIerables" because the orgin site is down...thanks

    ReplyDelete
  4. Deikensentsu1:25 PM

    I greatly prefer your method using the command line to downloading yet another application and installing it just to do one little thing. I don't have to extract MSI's very often so its ridiculous to install an application to accomplish this maybe twice in a year. I found a mention of the msiexec elsewhere but your start/wait did the trick where just using the /a didn't work.

    ReplyDelete
  5. Anonymous10:03 AM

    I uploaded "LessMSIerables" to RS:

    http://rapidshare.com/files/73338507/LessMSIerables-20051110.zip

    ReplyDelete
  6. Anonymous5:19 AM

    Thanks for the info, it really helped me a lot !

    ReplyDelete

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