Unattended installation or uninstallation in Windows

This section describes how to install or uninstall protection agents in the unattended mode on a machine running Windows, by using Windows Installer (the msiexec program). In an Active Directory domain, another way of performing unattended installation is through Group Policy—see "Deploying agents through Group Policy".

During the installation, you can use a file known as a transform (an .mst file). A transform is a file with installation parameters. As an alternative, you can specify installation parameters directly on the command line.

Creating the .mst transform and extracting the installation packages

  1. Log on as an administrator and start the setup program.
  2. Click Create .mst and .msi files for unattended installation.
  3. In What to install, select the components that you want to install. The installation packages for these components will be extracted from the setup program.
  4. In Registration settings, select Use credentials or Use registration token. For more information on how to generate a registration token, refer to "Deploying agents through Group Policy".
  5. Review or modify other installation settings that will be added to the .mst file.
  6. Click Proceed, and then select the folder where the .mst transform will be generated and the .msi and .cab installation packages will be extracted.
  7. Click Generate.

Installing the product by using the .mst transform

On the command line, run the following command.

Command template: 

msiexec /i <package name> TRANSFORMS=<transform name>

Here:

  • <package name> is the name of the .msi file.
  • <transform name> is the name of the transform.

Command example: 

msiexec /i BackupClient64.msi TRANSFORMS=BackupClient64.msi.mst

Installing or uninstalling the product by specifying parameters manually

On the command line, run the following command.

Command template (installing): 

msiexec /i <package name><PARAMETER 1>=<value 1> ... <PARAMETER N>=<value n>

Here, <package name> is the name of the .msi file. All available parameters and their values are described in "Unattended installation or uninstallation parameters".

Command template (uninstalling): 

msiexec /x <package name> <PARAMETER 1>=<value 1> ... <PARAMETER N>=<value n>

The .msi package must be of the same version as the product that you want to uninstall.