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ElasticSearch–Uninstall failed on Windows

Yesterday I shared how I got into trouble when trying to uninstall an ElasticSearch instance. I explained how we could investigate the issue and find the root cause by checking the log files. Today I want to continue by explaining what I found in the log files and how I solved the problem.

While browsing through the log file, I noticed the following error message:

Calling custom action Elastic.Installer.Msi!Elastic.Installer.Msi.Elasticsearch.CustomActions.Immediate.ElasticsearchExistingDirectoriesAction.ElasticsearchExistingDirectories

System.Exception: Can not execute Elastic.InstallerHosts.Elasticsearch.Tasks.Install.ExistingDirectoriesTask the model that it was passed has the following errors

BADELASTICSEARCHYAMLFILE: The elasticsearch.yml file we found in ES_PATH_CONF appears to be invalid  and prevented seeding current values.

It seems that ElasticSearch checks the elasticsearch.yml configuration file during the uninstall and doesn’t like what it finds there(which seems quite strange as the ElasticSearch instance was happily running with this configuration). Anyway, let’s have a look at this elasticsearch.yml file:

Most information in there are default settings, the only thing I added extra was the following line:

cluster.initial_master_nodes: node-1

So let’s remove this line and see if that helps.  Here is the updated elasticsearch.yml file:

And indeed when I now tried to uninstall ElasticSearch, it worked!. Problem solved…

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