Mathcad Prime Silent Install

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Renau Sheard

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Aug 3, 2024, 4:53:37 PM8/3/24

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Just curious if anyone has had any success deploying Mathcad Prime v6.0 using SCCM. If i install it manually from a command prompt it installs just fine. If i deploy it using SCCM, setup.exe continuously runs (Never completes) but nothing gets installed. I have checked all of the usual stuff, event logs, av logs but nothing is being reported.

Mathcad Prime 6 is failing to install using SCCM via System account. The Mathcad installer runs for a few seconds then aborts and reports an exit code of "-610". It writes a log file to the install folder in ccmcache that shows an error code of 1622 which is install log failure. Probably the main source of the problem is the XML file has the user profile folders hard-coded to a particular user (the one who set up the XML file), I don't know why it does that.

So, what the "PTC MathCAD Prime 7 installation_guide" tells you to do is to install Prime manually by running the Setup.exe. What this does is install and creates the "mathcad.p.xml". Then the guide tells you to pull that file to use as (the answer file). This file looks like this when you open it:

Notice the RED text above - this is what you need to edit so that the "SYSTEM ACCOUNT" (which is - by default - what SCCM uses to install software) can write to. That user path above cannot be written to, by anyone other than the users admin account (admin_JoeBlow). Not even by the system account can write to that folder.

OK so in our company we have a location that our software deployment logs are written to. This location is generic and you can create it anywhere you like. Example: C:\PrimeLogs, C:\Logs, C:\Windows\Logs. just make sure the folder you are writing to exists prior to running the installation. You can use C:\Windows\temp if you want.

I am hoping you can help me with this question, I am trying to do silent install of Prime 7 using SCCM, I got the .xml file. The information regarding the change of the log file is a big help, but I am also wondering about the rest of the properties that has particular user profile hard coded. For example:

What about these properties, do I need to change the path of these properties, if I do, what path do I need to change it to? What happens to if I don't change it and it installs in the users' computers?

Like the others said, you will need to figure out what the command line options for silent uninstall for your particular application is. They are all different, part of creating a silent deployment is figuring out which switches to use for install and uninstall.

The Get-Package cmdlet returns a list of all software packages on the local computer that were installed with PackageManagement. You can run Get-Package on remote computers by running it as part of an Invoke-Command or Enter-PSSession command or...

I would try using get-package piped to uninstall-package -force. This may be all you need and not have to worry with registry paths and uninstall parameters.
Get-Package (PackageManagement) - PowerShell Microsoft Learn

It appears the /s and /qn does not uninstall silently as a window pops up and asks to confirm uninstallation when running the script. Unfortunately our current RMM tool (Pulseway) does not support uninstallation scripts with user interaction so I need to tweak the script to disable user interaction but still proceeds with the uninstallation.

Those setup.exe files generated with InstallShield inherently support the creation and use of answer files that may be used to silent install applications. Although it has no logic to handle anything

If you dig around you could probably find a registry key to detect the presence of the program as well, but it seems like an older client so it may not make any registry keys, again this is something you would need to dig into to first find the keys, the test the uninstall to see if the keys are cleared at uninstall.