I recently tried to uninstall VMware player 7.1.2 – you know what? It popped up an error
The MSI '' failed
What exactly does it mean?… Well there’s a KB article on it kb.vmware.com/kb/1031302, which … again tells you ALMOST nothing. Look at the 500+ voting of 1 star.
But it does tell me one thing – to run a repair with the original installer. So I did.
Then? I tried to install VMware Player 12.0. During the install, it first tried to remove the previous version. Then it asked me for a file:
tools-linux.msi
from my C:\Users\(MYUSERNAME)\AppData\Local\Temp\(Some random number)\ folder. Hey how can you expect me to keep the files in that Temp folder?? Why the uninstallation has anything to do with the VMWare tools installed on the client machine? But at least we know what it is looking for…
Now I just need to find the files. They are at https://softwareupdate.vmware.com/cds/vmw-desktop/player/7.1.2/2780323/windows/packages/. If you are dealing with some other versions just tweak the url and you can list the whole diretory. I downloaded “tools-linux-9.9.3.exe.tar” and “tools-windows-9.9.3.exe.tar”. Extracted the exe. Opened a cmd window in administrator mode, and extracted the msi from the exe:
tools-linux-9.9.3.exe.tar /e ./tmp
With the msi files given, the installation went through. Now I can uninstall the whole thing.
If you are in the same boat, give it a try.