How to monitor software installation

June 7, 2006 9:15 AM

I'm looking for software that will monitor Windows while I install some other piece of software and then generate a report of what the installer did (copy files, create registry entries, etc.).

I'm trying to reverse engineer an installer for a client, but the client doesn't have all of the source for the original installer. I feel certain that such a thing exists, but I'm having no luck digging it up. If such a thing exists for OSX, that's a bonus.

posted by vraxoin to Computers & Internet (10 answers total)

For OS X, you could use the mtree command to spot changes to the file system. There's a tutorial, and sample shell scripts in this MacDevcenter article.
posted by jaimev at 9:25 AM on June 7, 2006

Best answer: A friend strongly recommends Installrite 2.5 for Windows PCs. It seems to meet the needs you've expressed.
posted by horseblind at 9:50 AM on June 7, 2006

Filemon and RegMon are great utilities to watch what's going on. You can filter by process name to single out just the activity you need to watch.

Also - both free.
posted by jimmy0x52 at 10:12 AM on June 7, 2006

For watching registry changes, I recommend Active Registry Monitor (Shareware).
You can also try Total Uninstall (Shareware, older freeware version is also good)
posted by Sharcho at 11:13 AM on June 7, 2006

You want InCtrl5
DL here
posted by Four Flavors at 11:16 AM on June 7, 2006

Best answer: total uninstaller does what you are looking for i believe. it costs a few $ to use now but i believe the old free version is still available. it does everything you need it to, the only difference is the interface is not as pretty.
posted by phil at 11:31 AM on June 7, 2006

echoing InCtrl5 -- I use it a lot and it does exactly what you're asking for, though only for Windows not OS X. (I do installers for a living.)

Note that only actual changes are recorded, so if your target machine already has, say, a newer version of a file that would otherwise be installed, InCtrl5 will not record the fact that the file is required (since it wasn't installed thanks to the newer version being there already.) So start on a clean machine if possible.
posted by anadem at 12:36 PM on June 7, 2006

While it does not do exactly as you want, you may find some related benefits are provided by Altiris' Software Virtualization. I've been using it recently to allow running conflicting different versions of some badly-written software, and it's helping tremendously. It's free for personal use.
posted by wzcx at 12:44 PM on June 7, 2006

Response by poster: Both InstallRite and total uninstaller seem to work well, and are free. I'd love to try InCtrl5, with 2 separate recommendations, but you can't even download a trial version of the thing, so I'm sticking with things I can look at. Thanks!
posted by vraxoin at 1:51 PM on June 7, 2006

regshot
posted by rjt at 4:41 PM on June 7, 2006