Can't uninstall matlab 2020a/2020b

[Walter Roberson]

The easiest known way to deal with that message is to reinstall MATLAB and the Aerospace Blockset. That should fix the files so that you can remove MATLAB.

Answer 1

[Deepak Meena]

Hi Zhimei,

It's not clear to me whether you want to install the matlab completly or want to uninstall partilcular toolbox , so I am going to provide solutions for both scenarios:

Trying to uninstall the MATLAB completly

NOTE: If you have saved any personal files within your MATLAB directory, be sure to place those files elsewhere before uninstalling MATLAB.

1. Stop the network license manager as described below. If you are uninstalling a standalone installation, skip to step #2.

a. Open lmtools.exe, which is located in $MATLAB\etc\win{32|64} ($MATLAB\flexlm for releases prior to 2010b).

b. Click on the 'Start/Stop/Reread' tab.

c. Click the 'Stop Server' Button

2. Run uninstall.exe from the $MATLAB\uninstall directory to uninstall MATLAB.

3. The uninstaller may leave files behind. To make sure everything has been deleted, go to the directory where MATLAB and the network license manager were installed and delete the entire folder.

4. If MATLAB cannot be uninstalled using the uninstaller or by removing MATLAB with the Windows Add/Remove Programs tool, you can simply delete the MATLAB directory and all of its contents.

Unintalling a Particular toolbox :

Refer to this link Uninstalling a toolbox

[Walter Roberson]

There are two reasons to not just start by deleting the directory and skipping the Uninstaller on Windows

1. Uninstaller cleans up the registry
2. Uninstaller cleans up the directory that MATLAB stores a copy of the installation file into in order to make toolbox installation and removal faster

However the Uninstaller does not remove the directory that Add-ons were downloaded into (or at least not if any other versions are still installed)

I do not know the locations of these two additional directories in Windows. For Mac they would be under ~/Downloads/Mathworks/R20xxx and ~/Library somewhere