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Creo 2.0 M050 Silent Install over network

BuddyHudson
1-Newbie

Creo 2.0 M050 Silent Install over network

To all Admins,

I am preparing to roll out Creo 2.0 to about 65 engineers and am having some issue with the silent install process over the network. If anyone has experience with this please reply back asap.

Thanks,

Buddy Hudson

14 REPLIES 14

I've had some success running it, what issues are you seeing?

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Doug Schaefer | Experienced Mechanical Design Engineer
LinkedIn

Hey Doug,

Thanks for responding. Well, I am going through the installation guide and of course everything is different now as far as locations of all of the folders and files, but I can follow it to a point, but then I get stuck on the part where it asks you to point to the DVD drive letter. I perform the typical install to my workstation like it says. I understand where the xml files are located that have to be used. Then, when it gets to the part about running the setup.exe from a command shell, it shows <dvd>: where this is the drive letter or the location of the downloaded DVD image. That is the part that is getting me. It is asking for an image?? Not sure what to do at this point. I have tried pointing it to a network drive where the copied DVD is, but that does not seem to work. The same goes for the client side components. It says to use the "/passive" syntax but I am not sure if this is going to require admin rights on the client machine. We have heavy security on our workstations here, and the entire C drive is locked to the users. It just seems like things are never straight forward when it comes to these installations. I would appreciate your help if you have time.

Thanks, Buddy

I think you simply need to point to the setup.exe file, either on the DVD from PTC or wherever you downloaded it. Here's what I used:

\\[server]\[path]\setup.exe -xml \\[server]\[path]\creobase.p.xml -xml \\[server]\[path]\pma.p.xml

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Doug Schaefer | Experienced Mechanical Design Engineer
LinkedIn

Hey Doug,

So when you run this, it completely installs Creo to the client system?

That installs Creo, but not the add ons. Those will run when Creo is first launched. You can automate those as well, there's instructions in the install guide on how to do so. Also, if you have other items like Simulate or Direct, you can add arguments to that command above to install those as well.

I've placed all this in a batch file. I've attached it here as a text file, you'll need to rename it, set up the file structure and set the paths to make it work (and of course generate your own XML files). I've also found that in order for it to truly be silent it needs to be run as an admin. I will also say that the last time I ran it, Creo wouldn't launch. IT said it was the batch file but I'm not convinced. I haven't had time to trouble shoot it, so I make no promises.

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Doug Schaefer | Experienced Mechanical Design Engineer
LinkedIn

Hey Doug,

Where are you putting the cache location for the client? Mine is defaulting to the App directory under the user on C:\.

Thanks,

Buddy

I haven't changed the cashe location. It's buried deep in the Windows user folders on the local drive. I've toyed with changing it, but haven't pulled the trigger. I'd like to put it on the network (we don't use Windshill), but I'm not convinced that's going to work with our laptop users yet.

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Doug Schaefer | Experienced Mechanical Design Engineer
LinkedIn

Thanks for the response. One more, are you editing any of the XML files per the installation guide? If so, what are specific reasons for the changes?

Thanks,

Buddy

Nope. I installed it on my machine exactly as I want it for everyone and simple copy the XML files to the network location.

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Doug Schaefer | Experienced Mechanical Design Engineer
LinkedIn

Ok thanks for the quick response.

Doug, this is not going well. I have everything located on the network drive and when I run the batch file it asks for admin rights, which I give, then poof! nothing happens. This may be a stupid question, but do you have to have anything on the client machine to begin with before running the silent install? I must just be missing something here. Why does it have to be this complicated?

Thanks,

Buddy

No, I don't think so. It should leave a system window open while it works, but you won't see any dialog boxes or anything. You might try opening a command prompt and launching the batch file from there to see if it's giving any errors that might tell you what's happening. Double check all your paths & spelling, many times for me when things don't work with batch files is a single character that's wrong somewhere.

Also remember, my IT guy thought there was a problem with my batch file. I don't think so, but I haven't been able to test it. It may be that I messed something up, double check it against the install guide.

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Doug Schaefer | Experienced Mechanical Design Engineer
LinkedIn

Hey Doug,

Just wanted to give some updates about what I have seen so far. I was eventually able to get the setup.exe -xml command to work, but it would only do it from a command shell run as administrator. I think there is a way to embed a username and password into the batch file so it will work for the client user, but then the .bat file would need to be converted to a .exe file so the users could not see the login details. Also, the silent install process does show in the task manager while running so you can tell if it is working or not. I am still working on this but will update you if I figure anything else out.

Buddy

Hey Doug, did you leave the "-xml" off of the last part for pma.p.xml ??

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