I am creating a basic msi installer that has both .net 2.0 and SQL express 2005 as prerequisites. I have the prerequisite for SQL set to reboot and resume no matter what after installation (our app that lives on top of SQL requires it). The install of .Net and SQL goes fine, but when setup.exe is run after the reboot, it seems like it is running the Windows XP setup.exe instead of mine off of the installation media. I am guessing the path to setup.exe in RunOnce is either not there or is incorrect. I haven't been able to look at the key value before it is removed, however, so I do not know what exactly is being put in there. Is there a log I could look at? (I am new to installshield, and as such am kind of noobish) What determines what exactly goes into the RunOnce Key when a prerequisite is set to reboot and resume? I am currently running my installer from a folder on the hard drive on the test machine, instead of from a CD, would that make a difference? I didn't think so, but I thought I should mention it.
For what it's worth, the prerequisite engine will set a RunOnce entry before it starts the prerequisite, in case the prerequisite reboots unexpectedly. You should be able to examine it any time after the prerequisite first starts installing, including during any dialogs it might show.
I reran my installer and the prereq engine did indeed place a RunOnce Value under HKCU that read "setup.exe" Unfortunately, this then causes the Windows XP setup.exe to be launched instead of my installer. Is there any way to modify how this reg value is written? Something along the lines of "[SOURCEDIR]setup.exe" would be prefect, I just don't know where to put it.
How are you launching the setup? It appears the path put into the RunOnce key should be coming from the command line that was used to launch it. If you are doing this from a command prompt or similar, and invoking it as setup.exe in the current directory, could you try instead invoking it with its full path? It would be good to verify which behavior double-clicking it will result in - I expect double-clicking would use the full path...
OK I got it now. I was launching the setup from a batch file included on my distribution media (I needed to run a quick script prior to launching the SQL installer). I just had 'setup.exe' in the batch script instead of the full path. I added some language to grab the local path and prepend it to my setup.exe call. Setup relaunches just fine after the reboot now.
I'm glad you found a satisfactory workaround. I've reported this internally as IOC-000063264 so we can remove the need for this workaround in a future release.
Hi Reed, I have the same problem but have not figured it out yet. Would you mind giving me an example of the language you used to figure out where your setup.exe is located so that it could be restarted after reboot? I am at a loss as to how to do this.
