You download and begin to install an Exchange Rollup Update only to find after waiting ages for it do the NGen stuff it fails, and on watching it closely you notice it fails on stopping services.
In the event log you are pointed at a website with information on verbose logging for MSI installations.
But you can forget that – the fix is easy! Start and administrative command prompt and run the rollup update from the command line! It will work first time (as long as the update msi file is actually copied to the local machine, it will typically not run from a copy on a network drive.
13 responses to “Exchange 2010 Update Rollups and Error 1603”
I got Error 1603 in my Rollup 3 installation. Do you mean I need to extract the files locally and run the setup in command line?
No, you just need to start the Command Prompt as an administrator. That is right-click the Command Prompt shortcut and choose Run As Administrator. From here you need to just run the MSI download – nothing else to do. If you run the download with /quiet at the end then there really is nothing else to do.
Excellent Thanks you
thank you!
Simple and stupid (that it’s necessary) and oddly undocumented anywhere in MS support collateral.
Thanks lifting the kilt on this one.
On the old version of this blog, hosted on Blogger, there were lots of other comments that did not get migrated across. These included:
Neil Natic, Sept 2013: “Thanks for this. huge help!”
Thomas Nielsen, Sept 2013: “I know this is a old post, but this solution also solved my issue installing Exchange SP3 Rollup 2 :-)”
Diem Silvan, Aug 2013: “Wow – works fine now : Exchange 2010 SP1 Rollup 8 Thanks a lot!!!”
Jerry Locke, May 2013: “Wow, that’s amazingly stupid behavior on the part of the patch installer. Even stupider that it’s not properly documented over two years later.
Thanks for the tip, I can verify it working correctly for Update Rollup 1 on Exchange 2010 SP3 (KB2803727). Strangely, this is the first time I’ve encountered this particular behavior, previous rollups have worked fine”
Frits Luten, May 2013: “The other option is to set the UAC (temporarely) to nothing … after that you can install the Rollup without having to use the command prompt and from any networkshare. Had the same problem with installing Rollup 6 for Exchange 2010 SP2 this morning ….”
Thank you so much. This was exactly my problem. It’s always the simple things, huh? You saved me a ton of time trying to figure things out.
Still works for RU22 on Exchange 2010!
Can’t believe how simple this fix was, thanks!
Works great, but needs to be run with the rollup file on the C drive (even if other drives are local) otherwise it seems to lose the msi it requires to run.
Currently prepping a SBS2011 server for upgrade and trying to install sp3 rollup 30 for Exchange 2010, ran into this issue. Thanks for highlighting this piece of stupidity 🙂
still saving lives! Thanks
Still works on Exchange 2010 SP3 Rollup 32 released March, 2021!
And Microsoft have an article covering this now, and all the other issues, given there were many during the March 2021 emergency patch. The tip is “always run complex admin required programs from an admin cmd prompt” and not double-click them