MSI required for uninstall of previous version of Calibre?

[bookishh]

Hello,

First of all, thanks for providing the software. Looks very well, works great, admirable.

I will donate in any case, as soon as I finish writing this post. But before I do that, I also wish to register a complaint about this parrot. It's stone dead.

In other words, Calibre appears to be one of those programs, which require original installation exe to uninstall old versions.

Please, please, please, I beg you to see your way to fixing this. It is ugly as hell; no sane person wishes to clutter their harddrive with installation media for programs downloaded from the net.

Since my last use of Calibre was quite some time ago, I even am not sure, if I *can* redownload original installation exe for that version (3.11.1 64bit WIndows). It is a problem not unique to Calibre, but is definitely annoying as hell.

To quote Stack Overflow on this problem (https://stackoverflow.com/questions/...ut-an-msi-file) :

"It is not normal or standard MSI behavior to ask for the original source media - it indicates a badly designed MSI package. If you experience this with a vendor MSI it is highly recommended that you report the problem to their support team."

Cheers and best regards,
~G

[Terisa de morgan]

¿? Sorry, I'm at a loss here. What original exe do you mean? If you're talking about the original install, sorry, no, you don't need it. As far as I know, you need nothing aside of the installer (and the installation if it's there for deinstalling, of course).

[bookishh]

Well, to make it more concise.

On my Windows 7 (64bit) , when I today installed newest Calibre (3.37.0 64bit), it wanted to deinstall previous Calibre version I had on the computer.

However, at the point of deinstallation of old version , it DID ask me for location of calibre-64bit-3.11.1.msi -- 3.11.1 being the previous version of Calibre I had.

The idea is that Windows usually silently keeps a copy of MSI files it ran, in C:\Windows\Installer\ directory (under GUID filename, rather than the original filename you downloaded, no less), AND if that file is kept, it finds it automagically at the point of uninstall. That's why, if you don't delete MSI from that directory, it doesn't need one from your original Download directory.

However, I do clean up C:\Windows\Installer directory occasionally (it is once again rife with 7GB of MSI files anyway, since I haven't deleted a number of more recent installs), therefore W7 couldn't find the MSI, so it asked me for it -- remembering to use the Download directory and original filename I had, too.

Since I didn't have it, new Calibre installation couldn't delete old version, and after finishing, I had 2 versions of Calibre on the computer.

If you want to duplicate the behaviour, delete everything from C:\Windows\Installer\ and try to uninstall Calibre.

I am sorry I am not very good with MSI, but as per the link quoted in the OP, the deinstall should run well even if the MSI of the original installation is not available, so I think this is a sort of a bug.

[AnemicOak]

Originally Posted by bookishh

Since my last use of Calibre was quite some time ago, I even am not sure, if I *can* redownload original installation exe for that version (3.11.1 64bit WIndows).

https://download.calibre-ebook.com/3.html

[theducks]

I bet you 'cleaned your system'. A normal install makes an system uninstall (log?) file.
If that become corrupt or missing, you get the MSI needed prompt.

[Terisa de morgan]

Originally Posted by bookishh

Well, to make it more concise.

On my Windows 7 (64bit) , when I today installed newest Calibre (3.37.0 64bit), it wanted to deinstall previous Calibre version I had on the computer.

However, at the point of deinstallation of old version , it DID ask me for location of calibre-64bit-3.11.1.msi -- 3.11.1 being the previous version of Calibre I had......

Ok, now I get it. No, I don't usually clean that directory (I didn't know about it), so for me it's not so a big deal. Thank your for the clarification.

[BetterRed]

I always keep the last couple of install files (.exe, .msi, etc) for all applications in my software locker. Then if I need one (because an installer nags or I want to revert to previous version) I have them at my fingertips. It's one of the reasons I never allow software to upgrade automatically.

BR

[ShellShock]

Originally Posted by bookishh

In other words, Calibre appears to be one of those programs, which require original installation exe to uninstall old versions...To quote Stack Overflow on this problem (https://stackoverflow.com/questions/...ut-an-msi-file) :

"It is not normal or standard MSI behavior to ask for the original source media - it indicates a badly designed MSI package. If you experience this with a vendor MSI it is highly recommended that you report the problem to their support team."

I think you have misunderstood that stackoverflow post. By "original source media", it means the msi that you downloaded, and not the cached copy that Windows creates when you run the installation. If you do not have the original downloaded msi, nor the cached copy that Windows created (e.g., you have deleted it from C:\Windows\Installer), then there is no way for Windows to uninstall. In the very next paragraph in the same stackoverflow post that you quoted:

"In most cases MSI packages can be uninstalled from add/remove programs from the control panel even if you don't have the original installation database for the MSI - the uninstall is run from a cached copy of the original MSI in the system folder %SystemRoot%\Windows\Installer (in some cases this cached MSI could be missing, see section 12 here for potential causes)."

So, the lesson here is: do not delete a cached msi file, if you want to be able to easily uninstall the program later. Of course, there are ways around this, e.g., by zapping entries in the registry. I don't think there is anything here that needs fixing in Calibre, rather you should probably think very carefully in future before deleting anything from C:\Windows\Installer.