(skip to the last part of this article for the quick and easy fix!, without all the background history, and no fun!).

 

I woke up this Saturday, very exited since I knew that the System Center Orchestrator 2012 Beta files was available!

and of cause I wanted to install it in my test environment.

 

Lazy as I am, I did a clone of the Opalis server that I already had deployed. This server has all the necessary components and consoles for all the IPs installed.

I renamed the server and uninstalled all Opalis MSI’s.

but when I started the setup, I got this message, saying that Opalis 6.3 is currently installed:

image

but it wasn’t!

I tied several fixes:

  1. Deleting all opalis folder on the harddrive
  2. Searching registry for Windows Installer entries about opalis.
  3. Checked to see if opalis users still existed.

Nothing helped!

I really wanted to know , how it detects the installation.

I could have asked in TechNet, or in the CEP site, but that’s no fun! and I would have had to wait for an answer.

So I went to the good old Sysinternals site and downloaded the utility called "Process Monitor”.

Get it here

Use the following technique to monitor a process

  1. Start the System Center Orchestrator Setup
  2. Start Process Monitor (Procmon.exe)
  3. Set the filter
    image
  4. Only include entries , which contains the Process Name of “setupsco.exe”
    image
  5. Clear the display.
    image
  6. Now switch to the setup and click install, to make the installer detect Opalis 6.3 and show the error message.
  7. Switch back top Process Monitor, and stop the capture.
    image
  8. Now you will have a long list of registry access entries, file access entries an so on.
  9. Read through the entries and look for registry read’s that is successful. Other applications might use other techniques though.

I found some in the end:

image

as you can see it tried to read a registry key, that is in the Install key, looking for a Product ID. So I opened the key (usually you can right click and select “Jump to..” but this didn’t work in my case for some reason.

image

Wow! It is an Opalis Foundation Object Install registry key!

Somehow my search I did earlier , couldn’t find it in the registry, but it is there!

So I removed it by deleted the main Install Key for this product as seen blow

image

and it worked! System Center Orchestrator 2012 Beta is now installing!

The Easy Fix (but no fun!)

  1. Open regedit.exe
  2. go to Computer\HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Installer\UserData\<User-ID>\Products
  3. Delete the key called “12155D6CE72B8F9340AD0BA962E373F6”
  4. Restart installation.