Case Study: COM+ 1.5 Rollup Package 934016 Installation failure on Win2003 SP2

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Recently we worked with on customer, who tried to install KB934016 on Windows 2003 server, however the Update.exe interestingly just crashed and failed to launch.

 

We went through below plan one by one till find the root cause and fix it. Share the detailed information as below:

 

Plan A: Manually extract the fix

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Download the fix and save to disk, open a command window, navigate to c:\kb934016, run this command to extract the packages:

 

C:\kb934016\WindowsServer2003-KB934016-x86-ENU.exe /x

 

In c:\kb934016\update, execute the update.exe.

 

Checked the setup log files, no obvious clues:

 

1. c:\windows\kb934016.log

 

2. c:\windows\WindowsUpdate.log

 

Plan B: Apply hotfix for update.exe

==================================

Applied this hotfix but the issue persists:

 

928595 An access violation occurs, and the installation process stops responding for Windows XP SP2, Windows Server 2003 SP1 and SP2 when the installation process tries to migrate hotfixes

https://support.microsoft.com/kb/928595/EN-US

 

Plan C: Start the Update.exe without UI with Local System Account

=======================================================

 

1. Download Microsoft PSEXEC:

https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb897553

 

2. Save it to “C:\tools\psexec.exe”.

 

3. Run “PSEXEC -s cmd.exe”, it will open a command prompt under “Local System Account” which will not be impacted by antivirus.

 

4. In the extract folder, run “Update.exe /Quiet /Norestart”

 

Update.exe now didn’t crash, and the error in setup log gives clue about some files missing in “C:\windows \$hf_mig$ \”

 

 

Root Cause

====================

For all the servers, we found most of the hotfix migration files missing.

 

1. Before we found this problem, the system had many hotfixes installed, including below hotfixes.

KB950974, KB952004, KB956572,…

 

If we review the documents of these hotfixes, we will found that: They’re newer than KB934016, and they update some of the files which have been included in KB934016.

 

2. When we installed those hotfixes, system put some “migration files” to “C:\windows \$hf_mig$ \KBxxxxxxx” folder.

Some times later, these folders was cleaned up by someone.

 

3. When we install KB934016, it review the system file versions and found those hotfixes. It will try to call the “migration files” before it started the installation. But those “migration files” are missing.

 

 Solution

  ========= 

 We recovered the files to $hf_mig$ and verified they include the migration files of those 7 hotfixes.  

 KB950974, KB952004, KB956572,….. 

 If we can’t find the necessary files from good servers, we can use this command to extract the files. (For example, download KB950974 and run ) 

 KB956572.exe /x 

 It will help to extract the hotfix files from the folder which you selected. 

  

 Regards,

  

 Freist Li from APGC DSI Team