Unattended Install for Windows

 Pre-configured installer

To get the installer, click on Create and you'll get both an email with download instructions and a link you can pass to your teammates or employees, and when they install Prey into their computers, they'll be added to your account. No Prey login required.

Notes

• Each unattended installer is created for a specific user. If your account has more than one user, be careful.
• Installers created this way will be available for as long as you need. Once you're done and don't want the package to be usable anymore, you can revoke the access from the same page and it will stop working for new installations. All computers already protected will be unaffected.
• The unattended install package will not create an uninstall file. To remove Prey from any of the computers, you'll have to run a command prompt as an admin and then run the following command:

wmic product where name="Prey Anti-Theft" call uninstall

2

 Installation using an MSI file.

The  MSI package is completely silent. There won't be any user dialog when installing. Any error will break the installation, and the output be written into a log file. No will be created. 

Let's start:

Open the command prompt as an admin, and run the following command on it:

msiexec.exe /i prey-windows-1.X.X-xxx.msi /lv installer.log /q AGREETOLICENSE=yes API_KEY=foobar123

Which should look like this:

Note: The version in Prey-windows-x.x.x varies depending on the latest release. 

If you need a confirmation message at the end of the process, you can change the  /q parameter to /qn+.  be  silent.

This method will fail on computers without an internet connection. In order to disable the immediate validation against the Prey servers just add the  SKIP_VALIDATION=yes parameter. In that case, the command would look like this:

msiexec.exe /i prey-windows-1.X.X-xxx.msi /lv installer.log /qn+ AGREETOLICENSE=yes API_KEY=foobar123 SKIP_VALIDATION=yes

Image Deployment

To image deploy Prey on your computers is simple. Steps must be followed entirely, though, or bad things might happen. The most important part is that Prey must be the last app to be installed on the master machine. You can't connect it to the internet after this process or you'll get cloned machines on your Prey account.

Once you're done with everything else and you are ready to setup Prey,

1. Install the regular Prey package on the master machine, double clicking on the installer.
2. When the process finishes, close the config dialog. Do not enter your account's credentials. We can't insist enough on this.
3. Disconnect from the internet.
4. Edit the prey.conf file and add your API Key to line 36. The location of the file is C:\Windows\Prey
5. Save changes.

Do not connect to the internet.

Now you can deploy the image into other computers. As soon as the new devices connect to the internet they'll be added to your Prey account.

Troubleshooting and Known Issues

1

Cloned Devices From an Unattended Install

Device registration is based on hardware. assign a serial number to all computers they sell, and it ends up being "To Be Filled O.E.M." In this case, Prey won't be able to tell that those are separate devices, and they will share the same device key. That means that a single device entry on your Prey account will manage several computers, the one sharing hardware information.

To prevent this from happening you can disable the "Overwrite devices if their hardware information already exists on this account" option from the Device Management settings and install Prey again. is only available for accounts with 100 or more device slots. If this affects you, please contact us to get it fixed.

2

Cloned Devices From Image Deployment

If the previous case doesn't fix the problem, then it means that you connected the master machine to the internet after installing Prey. That made it create the device on your Prey account, and then it cloned that same configuration all other computers. To fix that, completely uninstall Prey and start again.

3

Prey can't be reinstalled

If Prey is being reinstalled on a machine, but a previous uninstallation did not remove all traces of the Prey client, the installation process could fail and leave your device unlinked. Since this is an issue with Windows, please review this article from Microsoft Support. Please note that while the article references versions prior to Windows 11, in our experience the article helps solve these installation issues in Windows 11 as well.