Silent or unattended installation

What is silent or unattended installation
Simply said silent install is installation without any UI. In this case it’s about how to run “setup.exe” in silent mode. It’s recommended that you only run “setup.exe” when you install a new NAV installation, because the installer have been tested by them using this procedure only. So by that said it’s no longer supported to install from the different msi files directly. This is true for all NAV 2009 releases. The major problem you may run into if you are installing directly from the msi files is that you will not get prerequisites (as .Net, Report Viewer and so on) installed and you will also miss out one some pre installs checks (validating that you have everything needed as outlook).

How to-do it?
It’s very simple. “setup.exe” does support some different parameters for this purpose:
/quiet <– will turn of the UI
/log [filename] <– create a log text file in the specified location
/config [filename]<– point to the configuration file to use during the installation
/uninstall <– will simple un install the product
/repair <– repairs a bad installation

The first thing that needs to be done is to create the configuration file that we will use.

  1. Star “setup.exe”
  2. Click “next”
  3. Click “I accept”
  4. Click “Choose an installation option”
  5. Click “Custom Components”
  6. Select the product that you want to install
  7. Update destination folder if needed by clicking on the “destination folder” link
  8. Click “next”
  9. Click on the component that you have picked to setup the different parameters as “server name” and so on. When done apply your changes.
  10. Click “save configuration”
  11. Pick a good location, name and save the xml file

You can create as many configuration files as you want for different purposes. Now, you can run the silent install by simply doing start -> run -> [setupExepath] /quiet /config [configfilepath.xml]. Be sure to take a look to the log file, to ensure everything went OK.

Example D:\setup.exe /quiet /config C:\configfiles\config1.xml /log C:\log.txt