11Fix Windows Update or Service Pack error 80073712

It’s that time of year again, and as always, when I vis­it the fam­ily over xmas there are vari­ous PC issues to resolve.  This year there were blessedly few issues, but there was 1 prob­lem that it took me quite a while to track down and resolve.  One of the fam­il­ies PCs was fail­ing to install Win­dows 7 ser­vice pack 1.  It’s a fairly new PC and came with an OEM install of Win­dows 7 x64 Home Premi­um, all legit and activ­ated.  It also has up-to-date anti-vir­us pro­tec­tion, and oth­er than the SP1 install prob­lems it seemed to be in excel­lent work­ing order.

Error 80073712

The error thrown by win­dows update was error 80073712, which accord­ing to win­dows help (and the Microsoft help page) “occurs when the Win­dows com­pon­ent store is cor­rupt”.  Microsoft provide a tool, called the Sys­tem Update Read­i­ness tool (KB947821) which it sup­posed to fix this prob­lem.  I down­loaded the tool and ran it (which took quite a long time), after which it repor­ted suc­cess.  I then reat­temp­ted the SP1 update but it still failed.

After fur­ther research I dis­covered this is an issue which has plagued both 32 and 64 bit ver­sions of Win­dows, ever since Vista.  It seems to affect all ser­vice pack releases (KB936330, KB948465 and KB976932) Hence the Sys­tem Update Read­i­ness tool being for Win­dows Vista, 7, 2008 and 2008 R2.  There are lots of unhelp­ful sug­ges­tions avail­able, but the actu­al solu­tion is fairly simple, as long as you have access to anoth­er PC with the same OS installed!  In my case I had my laptop with me, run­ning Win­dows 7 x64 SP1.  I’m not sure if hav­ing SP1 may some­times make a dif­fer­ence, or if hav­ing Pro­fes­sion­al instead of Home Premi­um may like­wise some­times make a dif­fer­ence, but in my case these dif­fer­ences did­n’t mat­ter — my solu­tion worked just fine.  For more detailed inform­a­tion, I found the Microsoft Tech­Net art­icle “Advanced guidelines for dia­gnos­ing and fix­ing ser­vi­cing cor­rup­tion” very useful.

The Solution

Firstly, down­load and install the Sys­tem Update Read­i­ness tool.  If you’re lucky this will just fix the prob­lem the first time.  How­ever, before attempt­ing the ser­vice pack install, we’re going to check…

Click on start and in the search box type “note­pad %windir%\logs\cbs\checksur.log” to open the read­i­ness tool’s log file.

At the bot­tom of the file there should be a sum­mary which looks like

[code lang=“plain”]Summary:
Seconds executed: 685
Found 2 errors
Fixed 2 errors[/code]

If the num­ber of errors fixed is the same as the num­ber found then you should be sor­ted — you can now just go ahead and install the ser­vice pack or win­dows update as nor­mal.  How­ever, in my case it was­n’t, so…

The log file iden­ti­fies any files it could­n’t fix.  Files it can­’t fix are ones that aren’t present on the sys­tem for some reas­on.  You need to get them from anoth­er PC run­ning the same ver­sion of Windows

In the log file, under the sec­tion called “Check­ing Com­pon­ent Store” there will be a list of files that are miss­ing or cor­rupt.  I had 4 lis­ted as below…

[code lang=“plain”]amd64_policy.9.0.microsoft.vc90.atl_1fc8b3b9a1e18e3b_9.0.30729.4148_none_a9427d6be424cb66.manifest
amd64_10568c9df37e2a69df4103e1a1b191ca_31bf3856ad364e35_6.1.7600.16695_none_33990b4ad429800c.manifest
LDDMCore.ptxml in amd64_microsoft-windows-lddmcore_31bf3856ad364e35_6.1.7600.16385_none_07bd8a45fd3dcc23
LDDMCore.ptxml in amd64_microsoft-windows-lddmcore_31bf3856ad364e35_6.1.7600.20715_none_0892dc3716229fcb[/code]

The mani­fest files can be found (on anoth­er PC) in %windir%\winsxs\Manifests and the folders con­tain­ing the oth­er files are found in %windir%\winsxs

Copy the miss­ing files to the PC with the prob­lem, into the fol­low­ing locations

.mani­fest files into %Windir%\Temp\CheckSUR\winsxs\manifests\
.mum and .cat files into %Windir%\Temp\CheckSUR\servicing\packages\
any files from the folders with the long names (in my case the 2 LDDMCore.ptxml files) go into the appro­pri­ate dir­ect­ory in %windir%\winsxs

This final step may require tak­ing own­er­ship and chan­ging the per­mis­sions of the dir­ect­or­ies in question.

Now re-run the Sys­tem Update Read­i­ness tool.  Once re-run repeat step 2 to open the log file, and con­firm that the sum­mary sec­tion now says the num­ber of fixes matches the num­ber of problems.

Assum­ing the value for fixes is now equal to the value for prob­lems found, you can now re-run the ser­vice pack or win­dows update, which should succeed.

What next

If for some reas­on you’re still hav­ing prob­lems, there are some oth­er things you can try…

1. Run the Win­dows Update troubleshooter

• click on start, type “troubleshoot­ing” and press enter.
• In the con­trol pan­el win­dow that opens click on “Fix prob­lems with Win­dows Update”.
• Note: this applies to Win­dows 7, but the pre­cise details may be dif­fer­ent under oth­er systems.

2. Clear out the win­dows update cache…

• Click start, type services.msc
• In the ser­vices admin win­dow, scroll down to “Win­dows Update”, right click on it, and click stop.
• Click start, type %windir%\SoftwareDistribution
• Select all files and delete them.  If any won’t delete you can take own­er­ship and change per­mis­sions of them, or try again in safe mode.
• Restart the “Win­dows Update” ser­vice from the ser­vices admin window.
• Re-run the win­dows update troubleshooter

Extra things you can try

1. A disk check

• It’s fairly unlikely, but it could be disk corruption
• Open my com­puter, right click on the sys­tem drive (usu­ally Drive C) and select properties
• Click on the tools tab, and click “Check now”
• Make sure both boxes are ticked and click start
• You will prob­ably have to restart, and the check might take a long time

2. The sys­tem file checker

• Click start, type sfc /scannow
• You might need an install­a­tion disk
• This might take a while

3. Delete the pending.xml file in %windir%\winsxs

• Click on start, type %windir%\winsxs
• Scroll down and loc­ate the file pending.xml
• Take own­er­ship and change the per­mis­sions of the file
• Delete the file
• Cred­it for this to TyeGuy on TechAr­ena forums
• Please note that Microsoft do not recom­mend doing this (see com­ments below, thanks niemiro).  If you’ve got this far and it still isn’t work­ing, drop us a com­ment and we’ll see what we can do to help!

The last resort

Obtain a win­dows install­a­tion DVD, rerun setup and carry out a repair install.  You will have to rein­stall all updates.

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