Converting exe to msi

[John mitchell]

I have seen many times that there are many software setup are in .msi format.

My question is that :

1. What is the difference between msi & exe file format...???
   
2. How to convert msi to exe format...?

Please provide me the solution...!

[Raine]

MSI File Format :

MSI files are base files of data, used by Windows Installer. They contain information on a request which is divided into functionalities and components, and each component May to organize the files, data of register, short cuts etc file MSI also contains user interface which will be used for installation, and various other data such as the requirements to seek, carry out personalized actions, in order of the procedure installation, that it is for installations of administrative support, etc It can also contain the files to install themselves.

The MSI files are the current recommended way of doing installations on Windows. Alternatively, write a program that performs the installation itself. MSI files are executed by an EXE file which is part of Windows, called MSIEXEC.EXE. This application reads the data from the MSI file and executes the installation.

EXE File Format :

The Windows installer is fairly new, especially the newest version (3.0). Often installations that use MSI still come with a EXE. This EXE is a so-called 'bootstrapper'. It doesn 't perform the installation, it simply checks if the correct version of Windows Installer is present on the system, otherwise it has launched the MSI Redistributable (MsiInstA.exe or MsiInstW.exe depending on the platform ) and then launches MSIEXEC.EXE on the MSI file. In some cases, the MSI file and MSI redistributable are packed inside that EXE file, so you don't see they are there.

So installations can come in three flavors:

1. A custom, third-party installation system in an EXE file.
2. A Windows Installer installation in an MSI file.
3. An EXE file that bootstraps an MSI file.

MSI files can only be installations. EXE files can be literally anything that can run on your computer.

[chroma]

You can use this software to convert the EXE to MSI. I use the free version for my conversions.

Download EXE2MSI.

[JonathanD]

See the link below on How to create a third-party Microsoft Installer package

Link to Microsoft

See the link below on How to create a nested .msi package

Link to Microsoft

[ChrisJn]

This thread is a bit old, but I would like to share my findings.

The other posts didn't help me much, but they did say some kind of conversion is required. This is how I found out that I need to repackage my EXE installer to get an MSI.

There are a lot of repackagers out there, but I really liked only two of them:
1. The Advanced Installer repackager is very good. It even interprets the captured data.
2. The AppDeploy repackager. It's free and a bit simple, but it works.

Perhaps this will save someone else some research time.