Has anyone attempted to run InstallShield setup.exe's when booted in WinPE?

Looking for inputs on what steps are needed to get InstallShield (v6,v9,v10) to launch under WinPE. Not sure if it is even doable.

When booted from an WinPE CD, my attempts to run various InstallShield setups all failed.

Thanks.

MarkB

First get the Installshield runtime in place on the WinPE..

never done it either.. but I guess this would be the logical way to go about the issue. Installshield wont work unless the runtime is in place.

then again, might need to file monitor an installation using installshield to see what it is trying to access in the Win32 OS (of course that goes for registry also) so if it need to register dynamic anything to the OS structure. then u prolly need go to a kind of write media...

good luck to ya...

Why would you possibly want to run installshield under WinPE? You won't be able to get it working properly with an offline OS, and it won't store anything you install across reboots...

It could be useful if a critical app is damaged and is causing boot troubles. Sony for instance wraps their driver and critical apps (like power panel) in installshield. However, for this purpose, you would be better off grabing iscabview and the related mediabuildxx.dll from an installshield setup making program such as PRO 7 or Administudio 6 to extract the files and reg. tables.

Even better would be to include WinPack v3.00 by snoopy81 which can extract whole dir and let you modify and update installshield setups for v 6 and under. I use WinPack to add files and modify files that then allow a very tidy silent install. This is one of my little jems i don't readily mention but since we are talking about installshield

The major problem lies in making sure enough temp space is free and how to redirect file installs going to read only areas that are on cd such as system, system32 dirs. Maybe if PE is on HD you could run setups, but i would just use WinPack (to get files and whole dirs) and iscabview (mainly to get reg info) then use existing reg tools to import into the damaged OS.

Like I said, you won't be able to get it working on an offline OS. It doesn't work. Sure, for simple MSI's that are just a file copy. And if you can ever trick the installer to redirecting registry, perhaps. But throw in one custom action (which any complex MSI will have) and it won't work. I'm not saying it's not an interesting scenario - it is. But without work from Macrovision (nee Installshield)'s developers it is more work than it will be worth.