Utilizing this bat file really makes moving windows services and re-installing them in a new location a fairly easy and quick task. I had an instance where I needed to move a currently running windows service to a new folder in a directory. I found that an easy way to do this was to just uninstall and reinstall the service itself. For this I used a .bat file that includes a couple commands. First, we have to stop the running service.

net stop "Adam's Windows Service"

The next command is using InstallUtil.exe to uninstall the current service. This is the full line for uninstalling.

c:\windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v4.0.30319\InstallUtil.exe -u "D:\Adams\AdamsWindowsService.exe"

As you can see, the ‘-u’ signifies uninstall.  Now that we have the service uninstalled we want to reinstall it using the new directory location.  This line looks almost exactly the same as above, however, there is no ‘-u’.  Have a look at the following to install.

c:\windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v4.0.30319\InstallUtil.exe "D:\AdamsNewDirectory\AdamsWindowsService.exe"

My service is now running from a new directory at D:\AdamsNewDriectory. The last thing to do is to restart the service.  This is almost the exact same as the first line except it includes a start.

net start "Adam's Windows Service"

Now that we have an AdamsServiceMove.bat (naming doesn’t matter) we can easily modify it for any service to and from any location as well.  Have a look at the full file below.

net stop "Adam's Windows Service" 
c:\windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v4.0.30319\InstallUtil.exe -u "D:\Adams\AdamsWindowsService.exe"
echo.
echo Please verify uninstallation ...
pause

c:\windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v4.0.30319\InstallUtil.exe "D:\AdamsNewDirectory\AdamsWindowsService.exe"

echo.
echo Starting Adam’s Windows Service...
pause

net start "Adam's Windows Service"

pause