Introduction

This little article will explain how to bypass certain checks that MSI installers can do. This is for educational purposes only!!

So I am paranoid and like to have two factor authentication on my fresh installed Windows 8 Enterprise edition, using a token.

Example

In this example, I’ve looked at EIDAuthenticate, a smart card logon solution for stand alone computers. Now they have a community edition and an enterprise edition. The community edition only works on Windows 7/8 Home editions.

Starting the MSI installer gives me an error saying that I am running the enterprise edition of Windows and that this software can only be installed Windows Home editions. (It also shows a link where you can purchase an enterprise edition of their product)

Required Tools

InstEd It! - http://www.instedit.com/ - An MSI Install Editor (A nice alternative for Microsoft Orca)

Edit the MSI Installer

Open InstEd It! and open the required MSI file. Go to the table “InstallExecuteSequence”.

Here you’ll see an action called “LaunchConditions”. In the next table, called “InstallUIConditions” you will see the same action called “LaunchConditions”.

Let’s have a look at the action in table “LaunchConditions”.

In the condition row, you can see the value “Installed or (MsiNTPersonal = 1)”, changing this value to 0 will install only on non Windows Home editions, not the best if we want this software to be available on any edition of Windows.

To make this work on all editions of Windows 7/8, remove the action “LaunchConditions” in the tables:

• InstallExecuteSequence
• InstallUIConditions

Finally, save the MSI file, launch it and have phun!

Final notes

Yes, sometimes it can be as simple as this