Convert exe to aiproj?

[sfaust]

I had a hard drive crash on me and it seems that some of my installer projects were not properly backed up. I still have the exe installers that were built from the project originally; is there any way to somehow 'extract' an advanced installer project from the exe file to get it back? They aren't super complicated so if there isn't it's not a terribly big deal to recreate them but it would be enough time that I thought it was worth asking before taking the time to do it... Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Changing my backup system now...

[Sorin]

Hello,

There isn't a fully feasible method for recreating an .AIP project from an EXE. If your project is not too complicated I would recommend re-creating it from scratch.

If this is not suitable, you could try to repackage the installation : Repackaging an existing installation

Best regards,
Sorin

[sfaust]

Fair enough, thank you for the info!

[Sorin]

Hello,

You are welcome! Please let me know if you have any other questions.

Best regards,
Sorin

[sfaust]

Ok so just wanted to post an update I just found for this. You still can't just extract a project file from the exe but you can get a lot of data about it that will help reconstruct. Just two steps:

1. Extract the msi from the exe by opening a command prompt and typing "<Path to Exe>" /extract:"<Directory to Extract To>"
2. Right click the msi you just extracted and select 'Edit with Advanced Installer'

This will open the msi in the AI interface and it can tell you a lot about the installer. You can use it to get your info from the Product Details screen, files to install (although the pathing will be different but it tells you which ones are supposed to be there), features, custom actions, etc. Note that it's not a 1:1 so there are some things that are changed by AI when it creates the msi but it can give you a ton of info about the install.

Anyway figuring this out really helped me reconstruct my installer more quickly, hopefully sharing will help someone else out too!

[Sorin]

Hello,

Thank you for your follow-up!

This is indeed a good method for starting reconstructing the project although, as you said, there are some things that are missing from the original project so you have to pay attention when re-authoring the package.

Best regards,
Sorin

[sfaust]

I also noticed that extracting the exe creates an '.aiui' file. Does this have any relation to the UI for the exe and if so can any info be extracted from it? I tried opening in notepad but it's encrypted somehow so it didn't give anything useful. Also tried opening in AI but it just gave an error.

[Sorin]

Hello,

Our exe bootstrapper uses this file for rendering the UI controls but it cannot be used for exatracting information about the way the original .AIP project was configured.

You should still manually configure the new setup project to use our EXE bootstrapper features in order to accomplish your setup requirements.

Best regards,
Sorin