general windows application installation question

[ZenLord]

Hello,

First of all: I have quite a good knowledge of Windows and in general also its applications (installing/troubleshooting them for myself and others), but I don't have a clue about programming or low-level knowledge of what goes on inside an OS or the PC itself.

My question is: a) what happens in general when a program installs itself through a supplied installer and B) can I reproduce these steps myself without the installer? Probably some files are being copied to the installation dir and possibly some registry-entries are being written.

Now, the purpose of this question is that we use an application at the office, which we have licensed for all our computers. These licences come with a price we are happy to pay, but also the company is charging hard cash for remote installs everytime the application needs to be re-installed (following a crash, upgrade or replacement, which happens more than we would like in this small office), and also: we depend on this company to do the installation for us, so if they don't have the time, we have to miss a PC for several hours or even days...

We are almost all still working with Win98 because of these upgrade fees, and I would like to switch to win2k or winXP (some of our machines are up to XP, others still not, so 2K will probably be it for now), but I would like to find out what happens when the softwarecompany installs the soft. Could I run a program to see what has changed since they took over the PC, reproduce what they have changed and copy the changes to another computer?

If the answer is yes, I would make an unattended install cd with these changes incorporated - Then a crash doesn't mean we have to miss a computer for several days: just replace the hardware and run the cd...

THX in advance!

Zl.

PS: I know this sounds like I'm trying to circumvent a licence, but the program also needs to be installed on our server, and it only excepts connections for as many computers are licenced, so what I would like to do does not violate our licence!!

Edited July 19, 2005 by ZenLord

[Zxian]

If you want a good example of one way to make an installer, have a look at vcBlackBox's work on the NCAB project. It's got the basics of greating an SFX installer that extracts itself and installs the program.

Hope that helps!

[ZenLord]

THX for your reply!

This would be very useful, but first I have to learn what the current installer changes (files, reg entries, whatever...). Only then I can think of making my own installer - which is of course my ultimate goal...

Zl.

[Railman5]

If all you want to do is roll back a mashed up install, can't you use something like Ghost? to make an image of the pc in good condition or do you want to do more than that?

B)

[ZenLord]

Yep, but that doesn't help me moving the boxes from Win98 to Win2k... And not all pc's have the same hardware (in fact I don't think there are 2 of them with the same MoBo/Graphics-combo...)

I've been thinking: If I could do a diff on the hard drive searching for added/altered files and then a diff on the registry, with the possibility to 'record' the differences, then this might be the apllication I'm looking for. Does it exist, or something of the like?

THX!

Zl.