Opera 67.0.3575.53 installer fails during unattended installation

[A Former User]

A Former User last edited by

Hi everyone. I'm working on a piece of software that updates products installed on user's PC. I am having problems with running unattended installation of Opera.
Here's a way to reproduce the problems:

1. Clean VM
2. Installed Opera 25.0.1614.50 x32
3. Info in the registry - OK (under HKLM\Software\wow3264node as it should be)
4. Run a cmd instance via PsExec, checked in the task manager that it is by SYSTEM user
5. Tried to install the 67.0.3575.53. Ran the command line:

Opera_67.0.3575.53_Setup.exe /silent /norestart /launchopera=no /desktopshortcut=no /setdefaultbrowser=no /pintotaskbar=no

7. Installer failed with code 101
8. As a result Opera stayed unchanged.

So as you see I tried to reproduce what would typically happen on a user's machine: user has some old version of Opera installed and it was installed most likely by that user. Then our software updates current Opera running the installer from local system account.
What does code 101 mean?
What is the reason of a failure?

Any help would be appreciated.

P.S. I know Opera can update itself well but consider an option where Opera's autoupdate is turned off.

[burnout426]

burnout426 Volunteer @Guest last edited by burnout426

@daniel-kishlakov said in Opera 67.0.3575.53 installer fails during unattended installation:

What does code 101 mean?

Not sure, but did you look in "%temp%\Opera Installer" for an opera_installer_xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx.log file? Maybe it says what the problem is.

[A Former User]

A Former User @burnout426 last edited by

@burnout426 Hi, thanks. I found the logs and understood what was the problem.

You see, when installer is run under SYSTEM user Opera installer attempts to install itself to "C:\Windows\system32\config\systemprofile\AppData\Local\Programs\Opera".
It tries to unpack some archive there and fails:

[0306/154835.686:INFO:settings_impl.cc(1105)] Install folder set: C:\Windows\system32\config\systemprofile\AppData\Local\Programs\Opera
.....
[0306/154846.748:ERROR:installer_controller.cc(302)] Installer error: Unpack archive operation failed
Could not lzma unpack, error code: 7
Cannot unpack the installer

My hypothesis is as follows:

When I experimented with single-user Opera installations I saw it install itself to "C:\Users\<username>\AppData\Local\Programs\Opera"
When run under SYSTEM Opera installer for some reason decides that it must install in single-user mode and creates its installation path like it would in a single-user case: "%USERPROFILE%\AppData\Local\Opera". And %USERPROFILE% in case you run under SYSTEM expands to C:\Windows\system32\config\systemprofile.

It downloads a package and tries to unpack it to this path and fails most likely due to lack of rights to create files there.
After that I run the same command from a cmd run as admin and new version of Opera installed successfully because in that case it tries to install itself to Program Files.

SOLUTION:
To sum up the solution in case you want to install under SYSTEM user is to run it with /allusers=1 parameter. Then it does not try to use %USERPROFILE% variable and just installs itself into Program Files.

[burnout426]

burnout426 Volunteer @Guest last edited by

@daniel-kishlakov Glad you got it and thanks for the feedback. I added a link to this thread to https://www.reddit.com/r/operabrowser/wiki/opera/installer_commands.

[A Former User]

A Former User @burnout426 last edited by

@burnout426 Great