Sometimes it’s important to see what happens under the cover especially if things fail or curious to learn while running installer programs. I have needed to perform exact same tasks during my recent SharePoint Prerequisite Installer run and check logs to see what Preinstaller does and where it downloads all SharePoint pre-requisites software from.
Microsoft has introduced SharePoint Pre-requisites installer in SharePoint 2010 and it’s one of those tools that help you prepare SharePoint servers for SharePoint installation either offline or online by directly downloading prerequisites from Microsoft download center.
To get access of Prerequisite Installer logs, simply type cd %temp% and look for the PrerequisiteInstaller.*.log files. SharePoint spits out these logs at C:\Users\<User>\AppData\Local\Temp directory.
Simple tip but hard to remember!!! 🙂
