How to continue if an MSI is already installed

Question

I have a bundle which installs a Microsoft MSI first and then custom MSIs containing custom actions to configure the Microsoft product. However occasionally customer's will have already installed the Microsoft product and might be on a later version, which results in the bundle failing with the error message:

MSI (s) (48:64) [17:09:26:936]: Product: Microsoft Monitoring Agent -- A newer version of Microsoft Monitoring Agent is already installed on this computer. Setup cannot continue.

A newer version of Microsoft Monitoring Agent is already installed on this computer. Setup cannot continue.

Is there anyway to force the bundle to continue installing the rest of the chain? As the MSI is one by Microsoft there is nothing I can do to modify it directly, I can only make changes to the bundle and the custom bootstrapper.

Answer 1

The usual way to deal with this is with the prerequisite conditions in the bundle, such as system searches to find out if the product is already installed (or a higher version). This type of search used for a condition on installing the prerequisite:

http://wixtoolset.org/documentation/manual/v3/bundle/bundle_define_searches.html

so that there is an InstallCondition on the monitor setup.

It appears that you are unconditionally running the monitoring install. It typically takes some detective work to find some indication that a lower version (or none at all) is on the system.