Thursday, April 30, 2009

Fix to install .Net 3.5 on Windows Server 2008 - 80073712

I have spent about four frustrating hours trying to get my Server 2008 to have the latest .Net on it. After trying to install the dontnetfx35.exe manually and it failing and reading the Microsoft blog that I should install a hot fox and if that failed I should repair my whole installation. So dutifully I did this; still the same problem!!

So I stuck with it and followed the “System Update Readiness Tool” and let it scan my component store. Whilst it was doing this I learnt about the new way that Vista and Server 2008 handle OS updates here. After the tool had run I followed the instructions and looked in the log files for any errors and low and behold it told me that it was missing a manifest with wcf, which I thought would be the reason why it could not install the latest .Net.

After reading Aaron’s blog “Steps I use to narrow down an OS update installation failure on Windows Vista and higher”, I looked at all of the logs and found that mine was failing because it stated that

DepCheck indicates Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0SP1 (x86) (CBS) is not installed

So armed with this looking in the registry (from Aarons post), I find the missing package that should have installed the wcf manifest and it gives me a Microsoft Knowledge Base (KB958481). Now I need to install MSU into Windows 2008 as it is not liking the MSI’s as they have blocks in them in order to check what version they are being installed on. But if you look at this update for dotnetfx35 you will see that it is made up of three separate updates – one of them .Net 2.0 which I need. You can download this here. So I install these two standalone patches and re-run the CRU check (1st stage). It has removed my six missing dotnet manifests, but added a whole bunch of new ones!

I need .Net 3.5 on this machine as I want to put SQL Server on this machine and I am getting frustrated as this has been about 6 hours! Then a brainwave, what about the Visual Studio WCU (Windows Component Update), so I stick the Visual Studio 2008 DVD and navigate to

The best resource I found for Server 2008 setup steps

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc753802.aspx

 

Ok – After all of this – the simple thing to prevent all of this is not to setup IIS before you have installed the dotnet3.5 service pack on Windows Update. I found the best way to solve all of this was to just re-install the operating system. Leave it running over night and INSTALL WINDOWS UPDATES as the very first thing

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