I've been using VirtualBox for quite some time now. It has been a great tool to isolate my normal working environment from any changes I may make to the OS. It also allows me to work in my preferred OS - linux; even when I'm at work and am forced to use Windows. The road over the last year has been fairly easy. I've installed VirtualBox on a number of workstations and I even have one setup so that if the Windows box restarts, then one of the VirtualBox images automatically starts up (if I can remember how I did that I will updated this post).
Yeah, that's the error message I got one day when I was trying to upgrade the version of VirtualBox. To this day, I don't know what caused it. I suspect that there was some update to the server done by the server operations people that had some adverse affect on VirtualBox. Don't get me wrong - I don't think that the ops people messed anything up, I just think that what they pushed had some unintended consequences.
When I looked at the Windows Event logger, I could see that the VirtualBox installation failed with error code 1603. After scouring the internet for what seemed like hours, I found a single article that said that you should run the installer in logger mode to get more detail. So I did, this is the command:
$> VirtualBox-4.3.24-98716-Win.exe -lThis will create a log file that you can use to find some more detail on the issue. For me the log file ended up in
C:\Users\<my username>\Local Settings\temp\2\VirtualBox
It is a rather long file, but I looked for the spot where MsiRollbackInstall property was being set. Unfortunately, the stuff in the log before it wasn't really that helpful, but I could see that the last action that it was trying to do was MsiProcessDrivers. More internet scouring later, I found this article. The second post lays out how to fix the issue - simply disable the MsiProcessDrivers action. Here are the steps as I followed them:
If you still have the VirtualBox installation window open, you can copy the MSI and the cabfile from the same directory that had the log file in it to a new directory. If you already closed the installation window, just run the same command as before and move the files in the temp directory.
- Download the Windows SDK from here
- Install the Windows SDK
- In the bin directory (
C:\Program Files\Microsoft SDKs\Windows\v7.0\Bin) there is another installer for Orca (Orca.Msi) - execute it (I just used the Typical installation setting and it seemed to give me what I needed) - Open Orca from the start menu
- In Orca, open the VirtualBox msi file that you copied out of the temp directory
- Go to the table (on the left) called
InstallExecuteSequence - Scroll to the bottom of the table to contents to find
MsiProcessDrivers - Highlight the line and hit delete (or right-click and select "Drop rows")
- Once the update is made, hit save
- Exit Orca
- Run the msi file that you edited
Now when you run the installation, Windows will complain that you are installing untrusted devices - tell it to install anyway and VirtualBox will work.
After banging my head on this for a while, I called in some reinforcements and they came back to me with a single article from Microsoft - http://support.microsoft.com/kb/834484. The gist of the article is that there are a couple causes of the 1603 error:
- The folder that you are trying to install to is encrypted
- The SYSTEM account does not have full control permissions on the installation folder
- The drive that contains the installation folder is accessed as a substitute drive
In my case, I found that the second one was true. The SYSTEM account didn't have full control permissions on the installation folder. I'm not sure what was put in place by the powers that be, but the Program Files directory could not be accessed by the SYSTEM account.
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