Category: Installation

Installing Vista SP2 gives error hr=0x800f0a0c

For the last couple of days I have been assisting one the users in my Windows Community alltomxp.se (in Swedish) with troubleshooting the installation of Windows Vista Service Pack 2. The user just get “one or more system components that the service pack requires are missing. For more information, click the link below.”  The links leads unfortunately not to a page with any information on what is wrong.

In the CBS.log the following information can be found:

2009-03-11 20:43:11, Info                  CBS    SPI: Starting SP Compatibility\Applicability scan
2009-03-11 20:43:11, Error                 CBS    SPI: (CSPInstall::CompatibilityApplicabilityScan:993)Detected missing components, aborting SP install hr=0x800f0a0c
2009-03-11 20:43:11, Info                  CBS    SPI: Ending Compatibility\Applicability scan
2009-03-11 20:43:11, Error                 CBS    SPI: (PerformSPInstallation:764)Failed to install SP using UI hr=0x800f0a0c
2009-03-11 20:43:11, Error                 CBS    SPI: (wmain:1034)Failed to perform SP installation hr=0x800f0a0c

The problem is that components are missing, most likely because the application vLite has been used to customize the installation. This can be verified by looking if the registry key HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\vLite exist and then delete it. After that the installation of Windows Vista Service Pack 2 should proceed, hopefully without further problems.

Updating Apple Boot Camp – not an easy task!

Recently I have had experience with a customer running Windows Vista on an Apple Macintosh computer. Quite interesting configuration setup and totally unsupported from Microsoft, and to be honest I have never seen so many errors and problems with hardware and drivers as with this machine. Anyway, trying to upgrade BootCamp to the latest version turned out to be a nightmare. Applying the latest BootCamp patch resulted in an instant error message: “Error applying transforms. Verify that the specified transform paths are valid”.

It didn’t take me long to figure out that this was caused by not using a system which is “all-American” but finding out exactly what to change took a bit longer. I soon learned that one have to edit the registry and making sure that the language code set there is changed to the US English code.

You do this by looking up the registry key HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Installera\Products \82654E0F812156845A61E8A84572A2CD and then changing the value of the REG_DWORD setting named “Language”. To be able to install Apple BootCamp update this setting must be 0x00000409 (1033).

No image catalog for 32-bit images when running Vista x64 SP1

I have had severe problems with System Image Manager crashing when trying to create the Catalog file for a Vista Enterprise SP1 image. The other day an updated version of the Windows Vista Service Pack 1 and Server 2008 Windows Automated Installation Kit was released and my hopes were high for a fix being included. That version crashed as well and after studying the release notes it clearly state that what I am trying to do is no longer supported, as I am running a 64-bit version of Vista and am trying to create a catalog image for a 32-bit image of Vista. Another SP1 problem it seems!

“Because of the changes in the servicing stack in Windows Vista with Service Pack 1 (SP1) and Windows Server 2008, Windows System Image Manager (Windows SIM) cannot create catalog files for some Windows images of different architecture types. The following list describes the Image Manager architecture types and catalogs that can be created for each one.

  • x86 Image Manager
    Can create catalogs for x86, x64, and Itanium-based Windows images.
  • x64 Image Manager
    Can create catalogs only for x64 Windows images.
  • Itanium-based Image Manager
    Can create catalogs only for Itanium-based Windows images.”

See the release notes and download the new WAIK package.

The solution to 0xC004F013: Remove KB941649

Since the first build of Service Pack 1 beta was released I have had major problems installing it on our Vista Enterprise corporate image, with hotfixes, security update and drivers integrated. The problem has been that we have to install Service Pack 1 two times, the first time it will always fail with the error code 0xC004F013 but the second time SP1 would always install without any indication of error. Very annoying as SP1 takes some time to install and as we will be rolling out Vista in the organization it is totally unacceptable to have to install SP1 twice. And who knows what other side effects there might be?

Microsoft and I did some research and I first thought that a patch that is only available for order from Microsoft Support was the cause of the problem. After rebuilding the image without that patch the SP1 installation would still fail with 0xC004F013. Today, back at work after Christmas, I managed to figure out by reading the log files produced from package manager (pkmgr.exe) that KB941946 is the hotfix that causes this SP1 installation problem. And to be accurate it’s version 2 of the patch.

It would be very interesting to learn if anyone else who has a Vista image with patch KB941649-V2 integrated get this error 0xC004F0143 as well when installing Service Pack 1. The problem itself does not lie in SP1 and that is why it has been important to actually and finally get to the bottom of this!

Deployment bug found in Vista RTM

Long time no see! I have lots of things to blog about, I just haven’t had the time to do so lately. Last week though I learnt  about a tricky NetBIOS computer naming bug when deploying Vista using Windows Deployment Services (WDS). As you might know  the NetBIOS computer names cannot be longer than 15 characters and when you in Windows Vista (and all previously released Windows versions as well) change the computer name to a name with more than 15 characters you will get a warning message 
that will look something like the screenshot attached to this post.

Computer name change

When using Windows Deployment Services with the new option “Name and approve” the client before pushing out the image to the client, you can as you might have figured name the computer object in Active Directory and then fully automate the  installation process. In the unattended answer file in the computer name section for deploying Vista we have entered %MACHINENAME% to make sure that the computer name is not randomly generated with a name like LH-XY45YHGKL and to make sure 
that we will not get any questions to answer when deploying automatically.

We have a computer naming standard which obviously sometimes makes the computer name more than 15 characters. The bug is when you name a computer longer than 15 characters during Name and approve in the WDS. Then the unattended installation will fail at the specialize pass, without any particular error message, probably because it wants to show the same error message dialogue as when we are in the GUI version of Vista.

Vista SP1 RC installation error 0x80070059 solution

I still do not know the exact cause of why Vista SP1 RC1 kept failing to install on one of my machines, resulting in error code 0x80070059. However I must thank the Microsoftee Darrell Gorter who lead me to the solution, the simple solution I might add. The solution was simply to copy the file winusb.inf from c:\Windows\system32\DriverStore\FileRepository\winusb.inf_0362a280\winusb.inf to c:\Windows\inf. After copying the winusb.inf file there the Vista SP1 RC1 installation completed with no error codes at all!

Special character in Swedish alphabet causes Vista SP1 RC1 bug

One of the Vista installation bugs (error code 0x80070059) I told you about the other day has gotten a somewhat strange explanation. It seems to be a Swedish alphabet bug with sort order/collation of the “V” and “W” characters. I did some research on the Swedish alphabet and found out an interesting thing. In the Swedish alphabet the letter “W” does not like most other languages alphabets sort after “V”. Instead “V” and “W” are equal and all sortings should be made with the second character, meaning “Windows” will sort before “Voice” and not like in the English language where “Voice” would sort before “Windows”. One learn something every day!

First impressions of Vista SP1 Release Candidate

Yesterday evening/night I tried to install the newly released Windows Vista Service Pack 1 Release Candidate on both my work laptop and my main computer at home. The really great parts are that Microsoft added a progress indicator, which after the second restart in an upgrade scenario now indicate at what stage the installation is. There is unfortunately bad news as well, the installation bug I told you about earlier remain. The bug is that every first installation of SP1 installation fail with the error code 0xC004F013, but the second time it always works to install. Another installation issue is that I cannot install SP1 on my main computer, where SP1 installation fail with error code 0x80070059. Let’s see what Microsoft have to say about this!

Vista SP1 installations fail with error code C004F013

The first time I installed Windows Vista Service Pack 1 beta on my work laptop it seemed to install fine, but after logging in for the first time it wanted me to activate Vista to be able to continue. Strange I thought and of course I tried to activate it since our MAK key was in the image already. But instead of activating Vista the computer would just restart and the SP1 installation was reverted and the installation eventually was pronounced as failed with error code C004F013. I tried installing SP1 again and then it was installed successfully.

After doing another Vista deployment and installing SP1 I found out that the exact same thing happened again, and then again on another machine. I then filed it as a bug on Connect as the problem was also occuring with the standalone version as well as the one from Windows Update. Microsoft has now implemented a workaround for the problem but they are still working on finding the origin of the problem to be able to provide a solid solution to the problem.

I must really say that I’m impressed by Microsoft as they have been very professional and helpful in resolving the Service Pack 1 issues I’ve reported.