Thursday, May 26, 2011

What's wrong with installing an MSI and a PATCH at the same time?

A few fellow SCCM Engineers have come across this issue. You're trying to install an MSI based application and apply a PATCH.msp at the same time. With SCCM this usually is met with error 1635 unable to locate the patch file. This happens because when you specify the patch the MSI installer doesn't know where the relative location of the patch file is (probably something  that M$ has to fix up at some point).

To get around this problem there are 3 general solutions..

1. Separate the install and patch process (i.e handle them in separate steps)
2. Specify the absolute path the to MSP (which can be difficult if you have multiple installer locations)
3. Create and admin point from the original software and then patch the admin point with the patch.msp. This way you don't have to patch anything when you install as the admin point has the updated files already.

Personally option 1 or 2 are the easiest for me.

More information is available on MSDN: [also you can see in the example they put the entire path.]
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa370576(VS.85).aspx