Tuesday, November 8, 2011

Doing a manual uninstall of Lotus Notes 8.5.3

Disclaimer: I cannot be held responsible for the damage or loss of data resulting from this post. This post is provided for educational purposes.

The following link explains how to manually uninstall Lotus Notes. This is a last resort if you can't uninstall your client through add/remove or program and features.

Link

Below is quote of the instructions:


To clean a Notes or partial Notes install from your Microsoft® Windows® client, complete the following procedure:
  1. Delete all folders in the Notes \ except the \data folder.
  2. Back up the Notes \data folder and then delete all subdirectories in \data. Do not delete any root-level files from the Notes \data folder.
  3. If Notes appears in your Add/Remove Program panel, run the Windows installer cleanup utility located at Microsoft Help and Support.



However it doesn't explain how to remove the Lotus Nodes Diagnostics and the new Lotus Notes Smart Upgrade service from your windows services.

This is where the sc command comes in handy. To remove the Lotus Notes Diagnostics service, first make sure the services are not running ( actually you need to make sure they are not running when you follow the steps in the link above ) Next open a command prompt and issue the command:

sc delete "Lotus Notes Diagnostics"

and you should get a response:

[SC] DeleteService SUCCESS

The double quotes are required. However when you do the same for the Lotus Notes Smart Upgrade Service

sc delete "Lotus Notes Smart Upgrade Service"

you get the error:

[SC] OpenService FAILED 1060:


The specified service does not exist as an installed service.

Even doing a

sc query

you can't find the service name but it shows in your services.
To fix this, right click on the Lotus Notes Smart Upgrade Service and go to properties. Take note of the service name. It says LNSUSvc. Now try:

sc delete LNSUSvc

and that works with [SC] DeleteService SUCCESS


That is it. Hope this helps someone out there!

Lotus Notes 8.5.3 InstallShield issues

It looks like 8.5.3 AllClient ( Notes client, admin, designer ) and Notes Client was shipped without the .itw file used for InstallShield. By accident I used the default.itw that came with the Install Shield program. If you do this you get an error like this:




"Tuner is unable to open the 'D:\temp\LotusNotes853AllClient\Lotus Notes 8.5.3.msi' MSI file. The ITW file prohibits opening of the MSI file."

And


"No Msi database is currently opened"

Also I tried using the 8.5.2 All Client "LotusNotes.itw" file because I read in a post somewhere that it would work. However, I get the same error:






Last I finally found a post to download the 8.5.3 itw file. Grab the lotusnotes8.5.3.itw here