windows could not complete the installation

[george1421]

@MattPayerle OK so it sysprepped, launched and deployed OK upon reboot. The next step is to introduce FOG into the picture. Repeat the sysprep part, power off the vm and then pxe boot into FOG and capture the image. Then redeploy the image back to the same vm, reboot the system. Since the fog client isn’t installed then none of the fog post install actions will be carried out (make sure the early name change is not enabled too). The expectation of this test is to produce the same exact results as your previous test. If you receive the same oobe results (success) as your first test then go on to the next test.

For the next test you will deploy to a second VM. The expected results is the same as your very first test. In this case you must use your previously captured image (from above) and just deploy to a like Virtual Machine.

Understand this is the same methodical process I would use to find a flaw in my deployments. You need to back up to where you have success and then start moving slowly out to your final design. Once you have a failure then you can identify what changed between working and failure. If the deployment to a second VM works, then you need to introduce the unatten.xml so you can avoid the questions during OOBE.

[MattPayerle]

@Tom-Elliott Thanks for this, I had seen this as well through other forums, especially with AVG. Sadly, I don’t have this or any other AV installed during these tests, but solid note and something to look for for sure in the future, or as @Wayne-Workman mentioned, checking the process on the hang up. I’ll look to do that as well. I’m hoping I can find something that will be easily scriptable to kill because, it doesn’t do me a lot of good to look it up each time on a machine if a reboot will fix it anyway, which means scripting in a reboot would be just as effective here, just doesn’t answer the question of ‘why’ it happens.
@george1421 I’ll take a look at those deployment ideas, and get back once I have done them and report my findings.

Thanks all, have a good one!

[Wayne Workman]

Well, if you find a hanging process, what it is would likely lead you to an answer.

[MattPayerle]

@Wayne-Workman Agreed, hoping to find something that is hung that can be fixed. I redeployed the image that gets through oobe without hanging, but after I do answer all of the initial questions (Name, EULA, timezone, etc) and then it prepares windows and goes to a black screen and shows the original error message: Windows could not complete the installation…"

I did the Shift f10 and pushed tasklist to a text file as soon as I saw the error appear. I’ll attach that here.

I went to the Panther file and found the 3 files that were modified at the time that I dropped the image. There were a few files in there from a few days ago, so I found these in the IE folder under Panther.

Scratch that, I apparently don’t have enough privileges to upload a file here, can this be granted or is there a better way you would rather have me share these text files?

The Setupact.log file under Panther only had this for today, the reset of the items are dated for 2 days ago:

2016-08-28 16:50:40, Info [IE sysprep provider] Sysprep_Specialize_IE entered
2016-08-28 16:50:40, Info [SetIEInstalledDate LIB] SetIEInstalledDate() Setting IE Installed Date
2016-08-28 16:50:40, Info [SetIEInstalledDate LIB] On 64-bit OS: Setting IE Installed Date values
2016-08-28 16:50:40, Info [IESetup LIB] Calling CAdjustPrivilege constructor arg: SeRestorePrivilege
2016-08-28 16:50:40, Info [IESetup LIB] Calling CAdjustPrivilege constructor arg: SeRestorePrivilege
2016-08-28 16:50:40, Info [IE sysprep provider] Sysprep_Specialize_Shell exit

Nothing popped out at me on the tasklist, but happy to paste it or upload it.

Haven’t gotten around to the other troubleshooting steps from George, trying those later tonight.

[Wayne Workman]

@MattPayerle said in windows could not complete the installation:

Nothing popped out at me on the tasklist, but happy to paste it or upload it.

Please paste it, use the code-wrapping tool.

[MattPayerle]

Sounds good, pasted below.

Not sure if this would matter, but I selected all of the images to be Single disk, resizable every time, but since windows 7 has that 100 mb partition up front, would that cause an issue here? I went ahead and created an image for multi parition non resizable and am capturing and will deploy later on tonight. I noticed when I booted my test VM that the hard drive was nearly full at almost 9 gigs when I had originally given it 45. So I’m wondering if something happened there. Also, since it was a VM, I was booting originally from the ISO from the datastore, and I forgot to disconnect and remove the ISO connection before capturing. I’ll try removing this as well and re-capturing in a few different formats and redeploying to see if one of those (either partitions or iso/dvd) was causing some problems while you all review the task list Thanks again!

Image Name                     PID Session Name        Session#    Mem Usage Status          User Name                                              CPU Time Window Title                                                            
========================= ======== ================ =========== ============ =============== ================================================== ============ ========================================================================
System Idle Process              0 Services                   0         24 K Unknown         NT AUTHORITY\SYSTEM                                     0:03:18 N/A                                                                     
System                           4 Services                   0        604 K Unknown         NT AUTHORITY\SYSTEM                                     0:00:07 N/A                                                                     
smss.exe                       232 Services                   0      1,092 K Unknown         NT AUTHORITY\SYSTEM                                     0:00:00 N/A                                                                     
csrss.exe                      308 Services                   0      3,592 K Unknown         NT AUTHORITY\SYSTEM                                     0:00:00 N/A                                                                     
wininit.exe                    336 Services                   0      4,368 K Unknown         NT AUTHORITY\SYSTEM                                     0:00:00 N/A                                                                     
csrss.exe                      352 Console                    1      4,048 K Running         NT AUTHORITY\SYSTEM                                     0:00:00 N/A                                                                     
winlogon.exe                   384 Console                    1      5,716 K Running         NT AUTHORITY\SYSTEM                                     0:00:00 FirstUXWnd                                                              
services.exe                   436 Services                   0      8,180 K Unknown         NT AUTHORITY\SYSTEM                                     0:00:00 N/A                                                                     
lsass.exe                      460 Services                   0     10,448 K Unknown         NT AUTHORITY\SYSTEM                                     0:00:00 N/A                                                                     
lsm.exe                        468 Services                   0      3,604 K Unknown         NT AUTHORITY\SYSTEM                                     0:00:00 N/A                                                                     
svchost.exe                    580 Services                   0      8,872 K Unknown         NT AUTHORITY\SYSTEM                                     0:00:00 N/A                                                                     
svchost.exe                    652 Services                   0      6,332 K Unknown         NT AUTHORITY\NETWORK SERVICE                            0:00:00 N/A                                                                     
windeploy.exe                  728 Console                    1      8,388 K Running         NT AUTHORITY\SYSTEM                                     0:00:00 Install Windows                                                         
sppsvc.exe                     824 Services                   0     10,740 K Unknown         NT AUTHORITY\NETWORK SERVICE                            0:00:01 N/A                                                                     
svchost.exe                    864 Services                   0     42,704 K Unknown         NT AUTHORITY\SYSTEM                                     0:00:00 N/A                                                                     
svchost.exe                    888 Services                   0     33,628 K Unknown         NT AUTHORITY\SYSTEM                                     0:00:02 N/A                                                                     
svchost.exe                    924 Services                   0     13,156 K Unknown         NT AUTHORITY\LOCAL SERVICE                              0:00:00 N/A                                                                     
svchost.exe                    108 Services                   0     10,784 K Unknown         NT AUTHORITY\LOCAL SERVICE                              0:00:00 N/A                                                                     
svchost.exe                    316 Services                   0     29,184 K Unknown         NT AUTHORITY\NETWORK SERVICE                            0:00:00 N/A                                                                     
spoolsv.exe                   1116 Services                   0      4,060 K Unknown         NT AUTHORITY\SYSTEM                                     0:00:00 N/A                                                                     
svchost.exe                   1144 Services                   0     12,144 K Unknown         NT AUTHORITY\LOCAL SERVICE                              0:00:00 N/A                                                                     
WmiPrvSE.exe                  1856 Services                   0      8,668 K Unknown         NT AUTHORITY\NETWORK SERVICE                            0:00:00 N/A                                                                     
svchost.exe                   1912 Services                   0      7,720 K Unknown         NT AUTHORITY\LOCAL SERVICE                              0:00:00 N/A                                                                     
SearchIndexer.exe             1976 Services                   0     23,028 K Unknown         NT AUTHORITY\SYSTEM                                     0:00:00 N/A                                                                     
SearchProtocolHost.exe        1252 Services                   0      7,316 K Unknown         NT AUTHORITY\SYSTEM                                     0:00:00 N/A                                                                     
SearchFilterHost.exe          1204 Services                   0      4,620 K Unknown         NT AUTHORITY\SYSTEM                                     0:00:00 N/A                                                                     
cmd.exe                       1612 Console                    1      2,924 K Running         NT AUTHORITY\SYSTEM                                     0:00:00 Administrator: C:\Windows\system32\cmd.exe - tasklist  /v               
conhost.exe                   1000 Console                    1      4,832 K Running         NT AUTHORITY\SYSTEM                                     0:00:00 OleMainThreadWndName                                                    
TrustedInstaller.exe          1708 Services                   0     20,612 K Unknown         NT AUTHORITY\SYSTEM                                     0:00:03 N/A                                                                     
VSSVC.exe                     1760 Services                   0     12,244 K Unknown         NT AUTHORITY\SYSTEM                                     0:00:00 N/A                                                                     
svchost.exe                   1972 Services                   0      5,472 K Unknown         NT AUTHORITY\SYSTEM                                     0:00:00 N/A                                                                     
tasklist.exe                  2248 Console                    1      5,508 K Unknown         NT AUTHORITY\SYSTEM                                     0:00:00 N/A                                                                     

[Wayne Workman]

TrustedInstaller.exe is suspect. But, it could be any of these processes. Some I recognize, some I don’t. For example, it’s not winlogin.exe or lsass.exe or svchost.exe or cmd.exe

[MattPayerle]

@george1421 Ok, Tried these steps, and no matter what, it still threw the error at the end.

Good news out of all of this is I finally got a full log file in the Panther folder that shows items from today. It has several hundred lines, so I would rather not paste it here to avoid a lengthy post, anyway I can upload it here?

[Avaryan]

@MattPayerle You could use a site like http://pastebin.com/. Copy/Paste the log there and then provide the URL.

[MattPayerle]

@Avaryan Thank you, sometimes the simple answers are easiest to forget

http://pastebin.com/303D9uyj

[MattPayerle]

Ok, so I am about to shove rusted forks into my eyeballs. In short, this issue is resolved, but I don’t know what it is.

Whilst waiting and testing, I decided to take some time and work on polishing my reference image. I installed the fog client, a couple of other applications. I changed my unattend.xml to activate the built in administrator account, gave it a password, and did some other small adjustments to a SetupComplete file that didn’t exist in the first place, because I didn’t think it needed to be there if it didn’t serve much purpose at the time, especially for just a blank OS to be dropped.

Anyway, thank you all for your help and knowledge through this process. Feel free to mark solved, or at least solved (not a FOG issue).

[george1421]

@MattPayerle Thats great you have it working (sort of).
I’m sure you know this already, but I will state it again. Make sure the FOG service is disabled in your reference image before you sysprep it. Then use the setupcomplete.cmd file and sc to reenable the service. That keeps the fog client from starting its job too soon in the OOBE process.

[MattPayerle]

Thanks, yes, I didn’t even have it installed until last night, and I did disable it and have it re-enable in the new system. I like 1.3 because it shows up as a pending host automatically which is awesome. Just need to get name changing working from the Fog server and I’ll be set.

Thanks again everyone!

[bc601]

@george1421

How do you properly verify if the FOG service is disabled.

[george1421]

@bc601 There is a section in the FOG Client page on the wiki that talks about what needs to be done if you install the fog client before you sysprep it here: https://wiki.fogproject.org/wiki/index.php?title=FOG_Client#FOG_Client_with_Sysprep
Or you can install the fog client post imaging using the msi and the setupcomplete.cmd file. Two ways to go about it to get the same results.