This blog will cover techniques on how to identify and resolve Office installation failures. The techniques described can be applied to the installation of Office 2003-2010, and Office patches. ENABLE VERBOSE LOGGING The first thing to do when troubleshooting Office install failures is to ensure that MSI verbose logging is enabled. In Office 2007/2010. Apr 12, 2018 - 'C:Program FilesCommon FilesMicrosoft SharedOFFICE15Office Setup Controllersetup.exe' /UNINSTALL /dll OSETUP.DLL LyncEntry.
Ok I've spent a few hours going through this and there's a number of things going on here.
- Microsoft Office Professional Plus 2013 installs one entry into Add/Remove Programs but is actually made up of multiple MSI components that each have their own Uninstall entry in the registry, plus one entry that describes how to uninstall the whole suite.
- We search for 'Microsoft Office Professional Plus 2013' in the registry to find the UninstallString and get two entries back. One is the guid, and one is the actual entry in Add/Remove Programs that contains the UninstallString.
- The UninstallString for the product (on my test system) is 'C:Program FilesCommon FilesMicrosoft SharedOFFICE15Office Setup Controllersetup.exe' /uninstall PROPLUSR /dll OSETUP.DLL'
- The Chef
windows_package
resource assumes that the package to be uninstalled is an MSI unless there's a source location pointing at a non-.msi path provided in the resource:
Relevant code:
https://github.com/chef/chef/blob/master/lib/chef/provider/package/windows.rb#L282-L290https://github.com/chef/chef/blob/master/lib/chef/provider/package/windows.rb#L87
https://github.com/chef/chef/blob/master/lib/chef/provider/package/windows.rb#L282-L290https://github.com/chef/chef/blob/master/lib/chef/provider/package/windows.rb#L87
- Silent uninstall of Office 2013 requires a modified config.xml file provided as an additional parameter on the command line, otherwise a modal popup is presented :(
windows_package
matched multiple entries for Microsoft Office Professional Plus 2013 (which it then attempts to uninstall too) whilst the parent setup.exe /uninstall actually has removed the registry entry and package already, so you get an MSI 1639 (unable to find package). If there's a defect to address it's probably around here as we should detect the install type of each item to be uninstalled separately AND recheck the registry after each command to see what work remains.
I think I would uninstall by following the official Microsoft guidance here, officeuninstall.xml in the setup location (e.g. using the
template
resource) and then executing the uninstall command directly with a suitable guard:officeuninstall.xml:
recipe.rb:
Idempotency check
I will have a think about whether we can improve
windows_package
in future to cater for this case, thanks for highlighting the problem and hope this explanation unblocks you.Posted by1 year ago
Archived
Hey guys, I've been trying to uninstall Skype for Business 2016 silently for the whole day now, but I just can't figure out what the Problem is.
The Installation was quite Basic, I just wrote a small configfile and referred to it while installing like: Setup.exe /config config.XML -> done
But the uninstall part seems to be ways harder, I tried to write another config for this part which Looks like this atm:
<Configuration Product=”SkypeforBusinessEntryRetail”><Display Level=”none” CompletionNotice=”no” SuppressModal=”yes” AcceptEula=”yes” /></Configuration>
but it's always giving me an error that the Installation was damaged and that I should reinstall it.
Uninstalling via Setup.exe manually works w/o any Problems tho.
One Thing that also got me a Little further was 'setup.exe' /uninstall LYNCENTRY /dll OSETUP.DLL' for uninstalling, but it misses the command for beeing silent, so I still have one window that I have to interact with.
![C:\program Files\common Files\microsoft Shared\office15\office Setup Controller\setup.exe /uninstall C:\program Files\common Files\microsoft Shared\office15\office Setup Controller\setup.exe /uninstall](/uploads/1/2/5/8/125822253/218466264.jpg)
Anyone managed to get installing and uninstalling done completely silent ? I Need to set up Skype for SCCM :c
Thanks in advance
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