How do I install an MSI synchronously?

Question

To do an unattended installation of any MSI package, one can simply use the following command:

msiexec /qn /i package.msi

However, this triggers an asynchronous installation: if you happen to chain 2 dependent installations, you will have to wait somehow for the 1st installation to complete.

Is there a way to do this from the command line ?

Answer 1

I've had luck with this:

start /wait msiexec /i MyInstaller.msi ...

Found in this blog post from 2005. Hope you found it way back in '08.

Answer 2

We'd run into this a number of times with various products and I'd ended up using a small outer program that launches each msi and waits until it finishes to start the next one. You can probably do this in something as lightweight as a vbscript, but at the time we wanted a bit more gui so we had a larger outer program.