SharePoint 2013 (kb2726992) - The installation of this package failed

While patching one of my SharePoint 2013 farms with the April 2013 Cumulative Update, I kept receiving an error:

“The installation of this package failed”.

I had extracted the contents from the executable ZIP file and then just copied the ubersrv2013-kb2726992-fullfile-x64-glb.exe file to my VM.  After a bit of cussing and searching, I found a discussion forums thread, “Trouble installing April update to SharePoint 2013” where the poster saw the same symptom.  Following the advice on the thread, I went to Windows Explorer and put “%TMP% in the address bar, which then navigated to my temp file location:

C:\Users\administrator.CONTOSO\AppData\Local\Temp\2

In there I see a log file, “opatchinstall(1).log”.  Opened it up to find the following error:

OPatchInstall: Getting the data from the file 'C:\temp\UBERSRV_1.CAB'
OPatchInstall: Thrown CDetectionExceptionWin32(2)

The discussion forum thread mentions a missing CAB file.  Went back to where I originally extracted the contents, found the file UBERSRV_1.CAB, and then copied to my VM in the same folder.  Ran the CU installer again, and it worked.

The fix, then, is to make sure you grab both files if you are copying to a new location.

Another tip… see Russ Maxwell’s blog post on Why SharePoint 2013 Cumulative Update takes 5 hours to install? This seems to have saved me a huge amount of time as the installation itself only took a few minutes (while the troubleshooting and cussing took a little longer).