Extract MSI from EXE

emdadgar2 picture emdadgar2 · Oct 10, 2009 · Viewed 236.1k times · Source

I want to extract the MSI of an EXE setup to publish over a network.

For example, using Universal Extractor, but it doesn't work for Java Runtime Environment.

Answer

Daniel Dreibrodt picture Daniel Dreibrodt · Jun 4, 2014

For InstallShield MSI based projects I have found the following to work:

setup.exe /s /x /b"C:\FolderInWhichMSIWillBeExtracted" /v"/qn"

This command will lead to an extracted MSI in a directory you can freely specify and a silently failed uninstall of the product.

The command line basically tells the setup.exe to attempt to uninstall the product (/x) and do so silently (/s). While doing that it should extract the MSI to a specific location (/b).

The /v command passes arguments to Windows Installer, in this case the /qn argument. The /qn argument disables any GUI output of the installer.