Try:



msiexec.exe YourSetup.msi REINSTALL=ALL REINSTALLMODE=vamus



I have a project with a WiseScript wrapper. They wanted to be able to downgrade as well as upgrade, so my wrapper checks for the previous version and, if found, kicks off the new setup with the above command-line. All existing files get overwritten regardless of file version. (The wrapper also installs some prereqs, but that's not important here.)

thanks Bill



That's a useful alternative! It works nicely (with msiexec /i mysetup ... is that right?) and all files are installed.



It's nice that the lower-version file in the newer MSI doesn't overwrite the higher-version file that's already on disk.



There is a snag in that custom actions conditioned on "$component-action-state = 3" are skipped (condition is false) so upgraded devices wouldn't be installed properly, but maybe the condition could be changed to allow for this. Maybe ($component-action-state = 3" OR "$component-install-state = 3) would do it, or some elaboration on that.



However, my main problem is that we ship this particular product as a merge module, and I don't think I can have our customers do it this way. The merge module gets into MSIs made with different tools: IShield, WiX, etc., not just Wise; and our customers probably won't go for wrappers, anyway. There's a better chance we can get customers to change the sequencing of RemoveExistingProducts.



As in first post, I can't really remember why we moved REP to the front of the upgrade, but I'm thinking that it might have been to avoid a problem we later fixed (we had to run a CA to remove a device before running the CA to install it again). So maybe we can put REP after InstallFinalize now. I'm still reading the logs from the successful experiment upgrade with REP at the end, and haven't seen any deal-breakers yet.



Thanks again!

Could you not generate a new file from the old source with a bumped version, MYFILE 5.1 instead of MYFILE 4? Even though it is a copy of a previous version, MSI will see it as newer.

Good idea! I can do that before releasing the msm.



But it's got me thinking about moving RemoveExistingProducts after InstallValidate because it might help with my yesterday question "resume an upgrade after a reboot". If REP was at the end of install then files would not have been removed before the rollback that asks for a restart (which is what customers are griping about, in a different product of ours that also uses our merge module.)