sade055

Self Heal and Repair are two different concepts in Windows Installer which people many times consider to be the same thing, however there is difference in these two. Self Heal is triggered by advertised shortcuts, or other advertising information in the package which eventually Repairs the application. When the application is launched by advertised shortcut, it checks for all the key paths of the Current Feature , if any of the key paths is missing it will launch Repair. Note that if there are multiple features then it will not check the missing key paths of the other features, but only the feature of which the advertised shortcut is launched. Repair of an MSI can be triggered by Repair button in Add/Remove programs Giving the command line msiexec /f{other option} {MSI name} Self Heal by advertised shortcut or other advertising information. Active setup Once the repair of the package is triggered, even with Self Heal, then the whole of the MSI is reinstalled. Then it does not see tha...

In any of these installation transactions, viz. initial installation, repair, reinstallation, on-demand installation or patching an MSI, The REINSTALLMODE has an affect on it. Here is what "amus" means: * a - Force all files to be reinstalled, regardless of version * m - Rewrite all registry keys that go to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE or HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT * u - Rewrite all registry keys that go to HKEY_CURRENT_USER or HKEY_USERS * s - Reinstall shortcuts and icons The mentioning of "a" in amus forces the reinstallation of files on your machine irrespective of the file version rules. Every file updated by REINSTALL property will be updated in this case. The sequence of events which happen actually depend on the authoring of your patch. If your patch contains the full file, the installer will not access the source to reinstall that file, but if your file is the delta of the file, like an update to say ini file, then the patch will access first the machine file ...