How to extract contents from .msi files - Windows XP

My company’s strange “security” policy granted me administrator rights ONLY on my PC, but did not add me up to the administrators group of the domain to which my user account belonged to. That gave me kind of mixed permissions – and often caused some annoying “You do not have permissions” error. One such thing was - running an .msi file. I was installing AJAX Extensions when this one popped up again.

I have done some workarounds before for normal executables (.exe), with my handy WinRar, which would extract all contents of a setup package. But I was dealing with this Microsoft Installer, which was a bit tricky. But surfing through MSDN helps, as always! Learnt how to do it the black & white way:

Run the following on command prompt:
msiexec /a “the msi file with path” /qb TARGETDIR=”the path where you want the contents to be extracted”

Example:
msiexec /a “D:\Installers\AJAXExtensions.msi” /qb TARGETDIR=”C:\AjaxExtensionsExtracted”

Since I was an administrator on my local machine, I knew I had the rights to run the contents from the extracted folder. Well, at least I did not sweat much on it.