the installation of the features (products) I have in InstallShield works great. Nevertheless when I go to Add/Remove Programs in Control Panel, click "Modify", choose "Modify" again and try to add/remove/update a feature, all my selections and settings, which I chose during the installation, are gone! All the features in the Custom Setup dialog appear as unselected, also all path variables are empty. The Installer doesn't know where the source files are and what was (or wasn't) installed... And of course I can't do anything and get only errors. 😞
Did I miss something to set up or this is standard behaviour? What can be done in this case?
I am working with IS 2009 Pro and my project is a Basic MSI one.
This behavior typically should not occur unless the product and feature registration actions in the installation were removed or conditioned out (RegisterUser, RegisterProduct, PublishProduct, and PublishFeatures) or if the Windows Installer configuration data was corrupted (possibly through modifying Windows Installer owned registry keys).
You should be able to verify the product and feature registration actions are properly included in the package by running full MSI validation (Build->Validate->Full MSI Validation Suite from InstallShield).
The validation output (assuming that is the complete output in the screenshot) does not contain any likely indications of what is causing this behavior.
The sequencing of your custom action should only matter if it depends on something being installed with the currently installing product.
Is this behavior occurring on multiple machines or only some? Also, can you attach verbose logs of the install and maintenance modes?
A log of a first time install can be created with the following command line: setup.exe /v"/l*v C:\PathToLog\LogFile.log"
After the product is installed, a maintenance operation can be logged with the following command line: msiexec.exe /I {ProductCode} /l*v C:\PathToLog\MaintenanceLog.log
