The Exchange Server SE RTM file is 6GB in size. I have spent this morning repeatedly downloading it hoping it would complete and complete at the right size – I have been getting what looks like a valid download iso file, which I can mount as a disk but when it comes to running the setup program it fails with either “Incorrect Function” in the graphical installer (setup.exe) or “[WARNING] Installing product E:\exchangeserver.msi failed. Fatal error during installation. Error code is 1603. Last error reported by the MSI package is ‘Incorrect function.” in the cmdline (setup /mode:etc etc.)
As the file seemed to download fine, and the browser was throwing no errors, it was about an hour before I had noticed over multiple downloads that each download was a different size ranging from 3GB to 5.5GB.
So here is a more reliable way to download this 6GB file and then ensure that the Exchange Installer runs correctly. Built into the later Windows Servers is its own copy of curl. You can run the following to download the Exchange Server SE RTM build (use a different URL when SP1 etc is released), with retries, and retry regardless of the error. On the fourth repeat of the download, curl got the whole file and I could continue on with building my Exchange Server deployment (in Azure, if that has anything to do with the stopping of the large download):
curl -O –retry-all-errors –retry 5 https://download.microsoft.com/download/ad9b1e53-f28e-4a82-987d-6c88803795b2/ExchangeServerSE-x64.iso
The switches on the cmdline are -O (not zero) to save the file with its name to the disk (name being what the URL contains as the filename), –retry-all-errors for a retry regardless of error, and –retry 5 to do, in my case up to five retries.
In the above picture you can see the above cmd line, and the four attempts that my example took – 91%, 93%, an almost so close 98% and then the attempt that worked.
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