[wix-users] Burn's MSI Size Limitation - Single MSI payload overflow

[Rob Mensching]

Use MediatTemplate and don't embed cabinets in the MSI. Don't embed cabinets in MSIs anyway.

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-----Original Message-----
From: wix-users [mailto:wix-users-bounces at lists.wixtoolset.org] On Behalf Of Shay Martin
Sent: Thursday, March 17, 2016 6:54 AM
To: wix-users at lists.wixtoolset.org
Subject: [wix-users] Burn's MSI Size Limitation - Single MSI payload overflow

Hello,

I currently have an MSI installer. This MSI needs to be bootstrapped using burn to provide an .exe that passes the appropriate administrative elevation to a script that is executed on install finalize, this script does some prerequisite work required for our software. Administrative elevation is required for this script.

There is no way around not using a script executed by the installer, sadly, as I know this is not good practice. When executing the MSI directly, the script is not passed along the administrative elevation, despite defining the appropriate WIX elements/attributes in our source. However, excuting the bootstrapped .exe correctly passes elevation to the script.

So our solution is to bootstrap the MSI. The problem, our software is rapidly growing, when the MSI was sub ~2GB in size, Burn was able to provide an .exe. Now, our MSI is reaching a size of ~4GB, Burn can no longer create an .exe and results in an overflow error when linking (light) our source.

There is no way for us to break apart our large MSI into smaller MSI(s).
Our single MSI has a custom UI for feature based installation.

I did some digging around, someone indicated the MSI payload size defined in the Wix source for Burn is a 32 bit integer, yielding an upper limit for a single MSI to be bootstrapped around ~2GB.

Is there a solution to get Burn to bootstrap this larger MSI?

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