Manually uninstalling NI products with MSIBlast

[crelf]

NI has a tool called "MSIBlast" that you can use to manually uninstall their products if something has gone awry during a previous installation process. Here's a copy of the tool that I found this tool on the NI Discussion forums here. Of course, if you can use an uninstall shortcut, or add/remove programs, you should use those, but if you can't, this tool could help you out.

[bmoyer]

I know that this is not a supported tool from NI, but I'm curious as to what this tool really is doing under-the-hood? Does it remove registry info that is usually left behind too? Does it do anything different for uninstalling NI installations compared to non-NI?

Bruce

[crelf]

QUOTE (bmoyer @ Mar 19 2008, 07:49 AM)

Does it remove registry info that is usually left behind too? Does it do anything different for uninstalling NI installations compared to non-NI?

I *think* it does do a clean unistall. As far as I can tell, it justs exposes all installed components (including those that are hidden from add/remove_programs) and then calls the standard windows uninstall to uninstall them, just like a normal uninstall wuold. So, in short - the advatnage of using this tool is that it exposes installed software that you would normally not see.

[crelf]

I know this is an old thread, but I thought I'd add something here: I've updated my preferred method to using the uninstaller that ships with NI software - you'll find it under your program files\National Instruments\NIUninstaller folder (or it might be in \shared) - run "uninst.exe" to get the NI product uninstall dialog, or call it with command line switches to get it to uninstall components directly. For example:

uninst.exe /qb /x "Product Name"

Where "Product Name" can be found by running the following from the command line:

wmic product

Warning: the wmic call might take some time, as your software catalogs are trawled. You can also pipe the results to a text file or the like for offline viewing/manipulation.