I've run into an issue, due to Marketing setting our major version number well beyond the supported 255 size-limit (as described here). To fix this issue, we'd like to reset the major version number down to something more reasonable at our next upgrade. So if our version right now is 2002.5.1.1 I'd like to force-upgrade that to something like 2.6.2.1. I've created a major upgrade that has the version span of 1.0.0.0 to 2002.5.9.9 (to be able to facilitate upgrade form any patches to the 2002-branch in the future).
So far so good, the installer launches and does not give me the "A new version already exists" message, it does in fact act as if it is a fresh install (product code is different, so I guess that's OK). However during the file-operation section of the install I do get a message saying that a newer vesion already exists and the setup is aborted.
Can I force the upgrade somehow? I'm thinking I could maybe hack the registry by changing the installed builds version number to "trick" the installer into performing the upgrade, but that's a pretty uggly work-around if it works at all.
Another work-around would be to wholly separate the new version (by changing the upgrade code) and then asking the user to uninstall the old version... not a very nice solution.
I disabled the Custom Action NewerVersionDetected that was prohibiting the major upgrade, however this just produced another error.
--------------------------- ProductName Error --------------------------- Error 1316.A network error occurred while attempting to read from the file C:\Windows\Installer\ProductName.msi --------------------------- OK ---------------------------
Granted it is for ISD8 (which is the version I'm upgrading from though), but I'm guessing I'm having the same issue here. Problem is I can not change the version number of the previous version as it has already been released, in fact the "broken" version number system has been in use since 2005 and so I have no way of knowing exactly which previous version the customer will be upgrading from.
