Category: Windows

Windows 10 insider preview failed to install

Jeff Miles 3 Comments

I’m running Windows 10 insider preview on my basement computer at home, and sometime in the middle of summer it started failing to update to the latest release. I finally made some time to troubleshoot this last night and got it working.

During the install, it would get about 40% of the way through, and then fail with this error:

Windows could not configure one or more system components

After some sleuthing I discovered the log file for the upgrade could be found here: C:\Windows\Panther\NewOs\Panther, and I looked at the “setuperror.log” file.

In this, there were a couple of key errors noted:

0xd0000034 Failed to add user mode driver [%SystemRoot%\system32\DRIVERS\UMDF\uicciso.dll]

Failure while calling IPreApply->PreApply for Plugin={ServerPath="Microsoft-Windows-IIS-RM\iismig.dll"

Generic Command ErrorCode: 80004005 Executable: iissetup.exe ExitCode: 13 Phase: 38 Mode: Install (first install) Component: Microsoft-Windows-IIS-SharedLibraries-GC

I did come across a search hit when looking for the “uicciso.dll” error that spoke about IIS install failing with a Windows 10 update, and those two things seemed to correlate with the errors I was seeing in the logs.

I ran this DISM command to see the additional Win10 features that were installed, and noted a whole bunch that I don’t ever recall having put on manually, and certainly weren’t needed:

 dism /online /get-features /format:table

I collected a bunch, turned it into a removal command, ran them and restarted:

dism /online /disable-feature /FeatureName:SMB1Protocol-Server
dism /online /disable-feature /FeatureName:SMB1Protocol
dism /online /disable-feature /FeatureName:MSMQ-Server
dism /online /disable-feature /FeatureName:MSMQ-Container
dism /online /disable-feature /FeatureName:WCF-Services45
dism /online /disable-feature /FeatureName:WCF-TCP-Activation45 
dism /online /disable-feature /FeatureName:WCF-Pipe-Activation45 
dism /online /disable-feature /FeatureName:WCF-MSMQ-Activation45 
dism /online /disable-feature /FeatureName:WCF-TCP-PortSharing45 
dism /online /disable-feature /FeatureName:WAS-ConfigurationAPI
dism /online /disable-feature /FeatureName:WAS-WindowsActivationService 
dism /online /disable-feature /FeatureName:WAS-ProcessModel 
dism /online /disable-feature /FeatureName:IIS-RequestFiltering
dism /online /disable-feature /FeatureName:IIS-Security
dism /online /disable-feature /FeatureName:IIS-ApplicationDevelopment 
dism /online /disable-feature /FeatureName:IIS-NetFxExtensibility45
dism /online /disable-feature /FeatureName:IIS-WebServerRole 
dism /online /disable-feature /FeatureName:IIS-WebServer 
dism /online /disable-feature /FeatureName:NetFx4-AdvSrvs 
dism /online /disable-feature /FeatureName:NetFx4Extended-ASPNET45

After the restart I let the upgrade run, and it completed successfully!

 

Windows Updates failing on Azure VM

Jeff Miles 1 Comment

While playing around with some VMs in Azure, I ran into an issue where they could not perform Windows Updates. This was first noticed with failing Update deployments through Azure Automation:

In order to narrow down the issue, I tried to manually run Windows Updates from the VM itself. I confirmed that public Internet was accessible, but still received this error:

There were some problems installing updates, but we'll try again later. If you keep seeing this and want to search the web or contact support for information, this may help: (0x8024402f)

I ran the PowerShell command “Get-WindowsUpdateLog” which populates C:\Windows\WindowsUpdate.log (new behavior in Server 2016), and only found a brief error showing:

Failed to retrieve SLS response data for service

It was right around this time that I noticed a popup for memory exhaustion on this VM.The VM size I had chosen included 2GB of RAM.

I did a little test, and looked at Task Manager prior to running Windows Update – 45% of memory used:

Then I clicked “Retry” and saw the memory utilization ramp up to 55%, 75%, 85%, 95% and then the Windows Update process returned an error and Task Manager immediately dropped back down to 45% memory utilization.

It appears that memory exhaustion was causing the Windows Update process to crash out. What I don’t understand is why the page file didn’t come into play and grow to accommodate the memory demand; it was set to System Managed and there was more than enough space on the temporary disk to grow into.

 

After I increased the VM size with 4GB of RAM, it updated without issue.

Dell PowerEdge BIOS failed due to IPMI driver

Jeff Miles 6 Comments

I was updating the BIOS on a couple of Dell PowerEdge R620’s today and was presented with an error I hadn’t heard of before:

IPMI driver is disabled. Please enable or load the driver and then reboot the system.

This was very odd. A little bit of searching showed that there should be an IPMI driver service running in Windows, so I checked that:

Service 'ipmidrv (IPMIDRV)' cannot be started due to the following error: Cannot start service IPMIDRV on computer '.

Knowing this was a driver, I went to look in Device Manager, and was quite surprised to find this IPMI driver listed:

This is a Dell PowerEdge, I have no idea how this HP driver got installed – I’m not even convinced it wasn’t there prior to the other driver updates I was performing. In any case, this device wasn’t starting properly, and was preventing the service from starting. I uninstalled it and the driver:

Following this, the appropriate device appeared under “System Devices”:

Now I could start the service, and the BIOS update proceeded properly.

Powershell command as scheduled task

Jeff Miles Leave a comment

Here’s the syntax to use a PowerShell command in Task Schedule action, rather than a script:

Program/script:

powershell.exe

Add Arguments:

-noninteractive -executionpolicy bypass -command &{Checkpoint-VM -Name pxetest -SnapshotName 2018-06-23-PreMaintenance}

 

The key here is the ampersand before the command – when I was missing that it would not run.

 

 

ASR Deployment Planner throughput test failure

Jeff Miles Leave a comment

I’m preparing an environment for the Azure Site Recovery Deployment Planner tool, and ran into a problem with one of the tests. With this tool, you can run a few different tests independently:

  • GetVMList – generate a list of VMs from specified hosts
  • StartProfiling – run a profile job on the generated list of VMs, over a specified period of time
  • GenerateReport – generate output report of results based on dataset collected in the “StartProfiling” job
  • GetThroughput – run an upload test to an Azure Storage Account to get measurements of viable throughput for your environment (optionally done in the “StartProfiling” job too)

When I ran the StartProfiling job, I encountered a bunch of errors at the end which indicated it was related to the throughput test. So then I independently ran that, and encountered the following errors:

Output not in a definite format
click for bigger

UploadTest.exe has stopped working

 

There isn’t any other mentions online of this error that I could find, but I went back to the tool requirements and realized that I had missed a prerequisite.

Once I installed the Microsoft Visual C++ Redistributable for Visual Studio 2012 as identified from the ASR doc, the throughput test succeeded without further errors.