Troubleshooting MSI based installations – turning on logging
First off some credit to Aaron Stebner since i pulled a lot of this from his blog and that’s where i found the information first. He has a ton of information on .Net Framework on his blog.
http://blogs.msdn.com/astebner/default.aspx
One of the frustrating things about troubleshooting installs is not having log files to review, or figure out who is running when. There have been times where i’ve created a custom new image that has advanced MSI logging turned on so i can see what is going on during the State Restore phase of the SMS ZTI process.
Here are the steps to enable logging for MSI based installations.
- Click on the Start menu, choose Run, type cmd and click OK
- Run this command in the cmd prompt: reg add "HKLM\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\Windows\Installer" /v Debug /t REG_DWORD /d 7 /f
- Run this command in the cmd prompt: reg add "HKLM\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\Windows\Installer" /v Logging /t REG_SZ /d voicewarmupx! /f
- Re-run the setup and let it fail one more time
- Go to your temporary folder (go to the Start menu, choose Run, and type %temp%)
- Locate a file named msi*.log (where * is a randomly generated set of letters and numbers)
- Zip the msi*.log file (because it tends to be very large but since it is text it compresses nicely)
- Run this command in the cmd prompt: reg delete "HKLM\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\Windows\Installer" /v Debug /f
- Run this command in the cmd prompt: reg delete "HKLM\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\Windows\Installer" /v Logging /f
This will create logs in the %TEMP% folder that you can review.
You can also review this KB article from Microsoft:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/314852/
-Chris