I have an installer from a third party. Through trial and error I discovered it was an innosetup installer. When I call it with the /silent flag it installs just fine, until it executes installers for 3 dependencies (direct X is one, for example) which then require user input to cancel. I want to be able to run the installer and have it either install the dependencies silently or not at all. When going through the installer GUI normally it does give me 3 checkboxes at the end on the last page of the wizard (before I would hit the Finish button) that allows me to choose whether or not to install the dependencies. Is there a way of doing this that I don't know about? From my research it seems impossible without knowing the types and components available (and executing the installer with the /help or /? options had no effect) and I will probably need to get a new installer from the third party. The only other option I can think of would be to have some sort of timeout that after a certain period of time of inactivity from the installer I kill the install process (since the files I was interested in had already been installed at that point I think).
3 Answers
Checkboxes on the finish page sound like postinstall [Run] entries. There is no way to influence the selection of these from the command line, except that the original setup author can choose to have a different set of options selected for interactive install vs. silent install. (Or they might have extended the /LOADINF option to work with these, although this is unlikely.)
Given that this is a third-party installer, your best bet is to contact the original vendor and see if you can get them to change the default silent selection, or to add an additional command-line parameter to change the defaults.
Failing that, you could consider using a program such as AutoIt to auto-click the wizard GUI when run non-silently.
(If the things that it's trying to install really are dependencies, though, then you probably should let it install them. And it should be installing those silently too anyway.)
Killing the install process after a specified time seems like an excellent recipe for disaster.
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In my case the auto-click option, which I considered, would not be allowed to be installed from a security standpoint. Killing the process after a timeout is the fastest option available, taking all factors into consideration. Otherwise the best solution would have been for me to make my own installer. Getting a new installer from the third party was definitely out of the question. – SSB May 21 '13 at 22:55
Those are probably [Tasks] within InnoSetup's install, which you may be able to deselect by passing /tasks="" in the command line (along with the /silent). Here is a list of command line options: http://www.jrsoftware.org/ishelp/topic_setupcmdline.htm . Adding /suppressmsgboxes may help also.
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Unfortunately that didn't work but thanks for the suggestion. I think the only option I have is to either build my own custom installer from the files that get installed or kill the installer process at a certain time. – SSB May 21 '13 at 13:42
It seems it is impossible to do what I wish without knowing more about the structure of their setup. I was however successful in solving my original problem by killing the third party installer after waiting a specified amount of time (which I got from reading this question).
