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How to silently install MSDN to a non-default location

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I got a question from a customer who is trying to use the instructions in this blog post to perform a silent installation of VS 2005 and MSDN. They ran into a problem where MSDN installation failed, and tracked it down to an issue where the C drive on the machine did not have enough available disk space to install all of the help content. Setup was silently failing because it was being run in silent mode, and the customer had to rerun MSDN setup with verbose logging (using the steps here) to figure out why it rolled back. Once the customer figured this out, they noticed that if MSDN setup is run with full UI, they could change the path in the UI and install successfully. So the next question logical question was how to modify the silent install command line parameters to allow MSDN to install to a non-default path. After digging through the verbose log file, the MSDN MSI, and finally talking to a developer I know on the MSDN setup team, here is a command line that can be used to install MSDN setup silently to a non-default path:

setup.exe MSDN_QTR.3643236F_FC70_11D3_A536_0090278A1BB8="MyPath" /qn

In this command line, MyPath can point to any non-default location - for example d:\Program Files\MSDN\. The path does need to be quoted in this command line. Also note that if you want to, you can change /qn to /qb to cause a small progress dialog to appear during MSDN setup.

Comments

  • Anonymous
    November 14, 2005
    try "/qb-!" then no cancel-Button is shown...
  • Anonymous
    November 15, 2005
    Is is possible to pass ADDLOCAL properties through with this command
  • Anonymous
    November 15, 2005
    The comment has been removed
  • Anonymous
    April 11, 2006
    The comment has been removed
  • Anonymous
    May 26, 2006
    To get a Minimum MSDN install I set SCOPEDINSTALL=1. Not sure if this is the official way (other possibilities are INSTALLATION_TYPE=Scoped or INSTALLLEVEL=1). Note: I installed MSDN 2006-May after VS 2005. Also, Minimum is not small (mine was 890 MB), it just "installs a subset of the MSDN Library based on the features you have chosen during your Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 installation."
  • Anonymous
    July 18, 2007
    The comment has been removed