The Windows Installer Service could not be accessed.

[CX gamer]

Hello!

Thank you for making such an awesome program. I noticed it has a fix for MSI, but unfortunately it didn't work for me.
My system is: Windows 7: Professional and on my disks there are the remains of 3 windows installations. One of which is active. I've included a screenshot of my partition mess.
What happened is that my SSD broke and I copied my entire partition to a HDD using parition magic (the regular "partition copy" option, not the "migrate os" option). The new one wouldn't boot, so I installed a separate "tmp windows" somewhere else, which fixed the BCD boot process (which has previously been altered by grub when installing linux). It found my current OS under "recovered" when booting, so I removed the "tmp windows" afterwards. The current windows still used programdata and appdata from the old windows (the broken SSD), so I moved the location of the appdata folders using the GUI and used a NTFS link for programdata to point to the current windows. This is why my partitions are fucked.

The error: 0x80070641 - The Windows Installer Service could not be accessed. This can occur if the Windows Installer is not correctly installed.

Origin of the problem

I installed a pirated game and got infected (my own fault for being careless). I used Tron script to clean the computer up (since there was not even a start menu, windows was bricked before it).
Afterwards, I've been having trouble with running .msi files. In fact, I can't install or uninstall anything now.

Attempted fixes

There are a support pages on this problem, I've attempted then all, both with and without safe mode.
https://support.microsoft.com/nl-be/help/315346/error-windows-installer-service-could-not-be-accessed-occurs-when-you-try-to-add-or-remove-a-program-in-windows-xp-or-windows-server-2003

Method 1: Reregister the Windows Installer: Did this without any effect.
Method 2: Reinstall the Windows Installer: There was no dllcache folder, but the article is not for W7, so I continued. I renamed msi.dll, msiexec.dll and msihnd.dll to *.OLD and booted into windows repair which placed them back. Still no effect though.

https://support.microsoft.com/nl-be/help/2642495/-the-windows-installer-service-could-not-be-accessed-error-when-you-try-to-install-a-program-in-windows-7-or-windows-vista

Method 1: Reset the Windows Installer Service settings in the registry: No effect.
Method 2: Start the Windows Installer Service: The service was already started. Stopping and starting has no effect.
Method 3: Uninstall any earlier versions of the program that you want to install: Can't uninstall anything without MSI working.

I've also checked that registry entry HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\services\msiserver\ImagePath points to the valid executable in system32.

After trying all these options, I've tried Windows Repair v3.9.27 (Free Version). It fixed a ton of things, but alas not the Windows Installer. After running it, I tried the fixes again but nothing seems to help.

Does anyone know of any approaches I've missed? It's probably something dumb because of my system setup.
I'm slightly afraid to install windows for the nth time, since it takes a good while to get the system up and running (particularly windows updates are annoying).

Thank you already for the awesome program and extra thanks for any insight anyone can give me.

Sincerely,

CX

[Boggin]

This article will provide a list of services you can reinstall for Win 7 - https://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/236709-services-restore-default-services-windows-7-a.html

[CX gamer]

That's a great resource, thanks! Unfortunately it links to a registry file I've already tried. Didn't fix it this time around either.

[Boggin]

Can you run a command prompt as an admin and enter sfc /scannow to see what that reports.

[CX gamer]

Will do!

"Windows Resource Protection did not find any integrity violation."

The first time I ran it, it did find some things and fixed them. But now there's nothing to find.

[Boggin]

I'm not sure if a repair install would resolve but your Win 7 install disk would need to include SP1.

If it doesn't, I can supply you with a couple of Pro x64 SP1 disks.

This won't affect your personal stuff or installed programs, although you would still be faced with the Windows Updates, but before sitting through those you could check to see if you were then able to install anything else.

However, I think I'd be inclined to backing up personal stuff, formatting the HDD and doing a clean install of Win 7.

You can also back up your drivers onto something like an USB stick and drag & drop them back in after.

They can be found in C:\Windows\System32 - if your current volume is in C:

[CX gamer]

Alright man, thanks for the help. I'll be installing Windows fresh again. And be more careful when installing stuff in the future. Have a nice day!

[Boggin]

Hope things work out for you