Author Topic: Running v4.4.1 farkles Windows Update on Win10 w/ 0x80070643 error (Read 12168 times)

jhvance · « **on:** January 13, 2019, 01:50:50 pm »

I have 2 Win10 Home laptops on which I yesterday ran overnight the latest version of the all-in-one repair tool (something I do 2-3 times/year) after their regularly weekly battery of malware scans, and today cannot successfully update the OS to install the latest Windows Defender definitions -- it now consistently fails with that 80070643 error message, implicating the TwAI1 app. I've followed a number of the MS-provided suggestions (namely opening a Powershell window with administrative privileges and running the SFC, DISM and CHKDSK tools within before rebooting) without regaining full function, searched for non-MS advice without finding any magic bullets and so thought I'd post a problem description here to see if there were other sage bits of advice which might be offered by the app cognoscenti.

Both laptops had no problems with the round of Patch Tuesday updates last week, have generally been kept up-to-date in all other respects, and both have the 64-bit OS flavor (one is build 1803, the other 1809). My first inclination is to go back to the restore point I'd set before launching TwAI1 and see if that resolves the issue, but want to start a thread and then provide updates as I try that on each machine.

Boggin · « **Reply #1 on:** January 13, 2019, 02:20:41 pm »

I would try your restore points.

jhvance · « **Reply #2 on:** January 13, 2019, 02:44:21 pm »

Unfortunately, although I made certain to establish backup and restore points within TwIA1 before kicking it off on each machine, neither one now recognizes that it did that and finds no previous restore point at all.

Boggin · « **Reply #3 on:** January 13, 2019, 03:03:13 pm »

It's been found that when you use the program to create a restore point, while it says it has, it hasn't.

I've reported that to Shane, but it doesn't appear to have been addressed yet.

There is another back up which the program auto does before starting the repairs and that is accessed from within the program under Backup Tools.

Click on Restore under the Registry Backup then click on Registry Restore and use the dropdown to select the dated back up and hit Restore Now, but did you not have any other restore points to choose from ?

jhvance · « **Reply #4 on:** January 13, 2019, 07:22:43 pm »

There were exactly two registry backups from yesterday (and none earlier), so I toggled the first and had the program restore it, then rebooted and tried WU -- no joy with the 1st candidate, same error citation. The 2nd candidate has gone into a chkdsk-at-boot cycle that seems to have reached a plateau at 10% complete.

There was no system restore point in the 1st candidate to select, despite the fact I had the app create one before launching it for its automated run and shutdown. I haven't yet been able to check that feature in the 2nd candidate because of the stalled disk check.

Boggin · « **Reply #5 on:** January 14, 2019, 01:08:30 am »

Win 10's chkdsk can look as if it is frozen as it displays differently to Win 7 - I don't know what it looks like in Win 8/8.1 not having used that OS.

Sometimes though a chkdsk can take a while to run so I'd wait it out for a few hours to see if it completes.

If you think it has definitely stuck then you will need to power down and reboot where you should get the option to stop a chkdsk on boot.

Open a Command Prompt (Admin) or Powershell (Admin) and enter these cmds -

dism /online /cleanup-image /startcomponentcleanup

dism /online /cleanup-image /restorehealth

sfc /scannow

These can take a while to run, but when done, perform another chkdsk /f to see if it will complete.

To view a chkdsk report, open Event Viewer and ensure Event Viewer (Local) is highlighted in the left pane by clicking on if necessary and when it has read the data, expand Windows Logs and click on Application/Action/Find and type chkdsk or wininit into the Find box and press enter.

Cancel the Find box and read the report in the scrollable window below.

Primarily you are looking to see if it reports any KBs in bad sectors in which case you should immediately create a full system image for the pending total HDD fail and then perform a chkdsk /r

In System protection when not all restore points are visible, you can get a box to check to show more restore points.

When you first go to the restore points, are the showing as on ?

jhvance · « **Reply #6 on:** January 17, 2019, 07:59:56 am »

Thanks very much for your response and advice -- I had run the dism /restorehealth earlier (but without the /startcomponentcleanup switch) on the laptop which was experiencing the endless CHKDSK, that never budged beyond 10% even though I'd let it run for several hours before I had made the initial post. That symptom was unique to the 1809 machine, which afterward had crashed with a BSOD followed by some Dell-flavored recovery process that was wanting to reinstall a completely clean image (i.e., return to an out-of-box state) -- I chose instead to toggle the power-button icon that was offered and rebooted to a normal desktop, at which point I ran through all of those commands as you outlined in an administrator-enabled Powershell window, but specified the /X switch in the CHKDSK command to dismount the volume. This seems to have completely resolved the WU issue it was experiencing, and all seems back to normal.

Not so for the 1803 laptop (a Toshiba with space-constrained SSD, so unlikely to experience a drive failure); although I've run the various Windows troubleshooters and had them "fix" the issue(s) found and then through the same process you outlined that worked with the 1809 laptop, that 0x80070643 error continues when WU runs. In looking over the Event Viewer details, all but one of the most recent failure is associated with the standard KB for Windows Defender updates (KB2267602), but the latest includes an additional entry for the latest security update (KB4023057, the 2018-11 update) -- MS indicates this update is available through WU, but not independently through the update catalog.

Further thoughts?

Boggin · « **Reply #7 on:** January 17, 2019, 02:42:50 pm »

What's causing the WD update fail could also be causing the fail of the security update.

Let's see if resetting the update components will help.

Open a Command Prompt (Admin) or Powershell (Admain) and copy & paste these cmds en bloc to the prompt where they will auto run except perhaps for the last one where you will need to press enter.

net stop wuauserv

net stop cryptSvc

net stop bits

net stop msiserver

ren C:\Windows\SoftwareDistribution SoftwareDistribution.old

ren C:\Windows\System32\catroot2 catroot2.old

net start wuauserv

net start cryptSvc

net start bits

net start msiserver

Enter exit to close the cmd window and try the updates again.

jhvance · « **Reply #8 on:** January 18, 2019, 12:26:32 pm »

Well, there is some progress as a result of those actions -- WU did identify both a Defender update and the 2019-01 W10v1803 update, then proceeded to download and attempt to install those two items. The 2019-01 update was successful; the WU update failed with that same 0x80070643 error.

So, it's good that the non-Defender updates are processed successfully; Panda Dome is the primary AV on that machine and Defender was set to run periodically, and I wondered if that setting was still valid -- turns out, there's a problem with Defender which might provide insight. That "periodic scanning" toggle had reverted to the default "Off" position, and when I toggled it to "On" then clicked "Yes" for the subsequent UAC shield, it turned "Off" -- ran back through the Powershell commands again, rebooted and tried again but the same behavior remains.

Boggin · « **Reply #9 on:** January 18, 2019, 02:19:11 pm »

When you install a 3rd party AV program it is supposed to disable Windows Defender, but the fact that is still active alongside Panda Dome is probably the cause of your problems as you shouldn't run two AV programs as they can cause anomalous problems.

Follow the steps in this article to uninstall Panda Dome and then see if the updates install as they should.

https://www.pandasecurity.com/usa/support/card?id=82011

jhvance · « **Reply #10 on:** January 19, 2019, 07:07:55 am »

I appreciate the assistance, but please be aware I am not a newbie with computers (have been dealing with mainframes, minicomputers and then PCs from the early 1970s onward); I've been running the Panda Dome AV -nee FREEAV- in parallel with Defender or MSE on various Windows computers for years without this particular sort of issue -- they are not incompatible. When I have time later today, I'll uninstall Domeand test on that particular laptop to see whether WU will then install its updates, and if so re-install Dome and retest.

Boggin · « **Reply #11 on:** January 19, 2019, 07:31:15 am »

Does Panda Dome have its own firewall ?

If it doesn't then that could be why it hasn't disabled WD.

It's never a good idea to run two AV programs as that can cause anomalous problems and impact on performance -

https://www.quora.com/Can-Panda-free-anti-virus-be-used-in-combination-with-Windows-Defender-on-Windows-10

jhvance · « **Reply #12 on:** January 23, 2019, 01:45:49 pm »

I've uninstalled Panda Dome, first from within Windows and then after rebooting by applying the Panda uninstaller. Tried it again after rebooting, and no joy (same error message) -- since I have run Panda in parallel with all flavors of Windows on all of my machines (XP, Win7, Win10) since 2013 and began using the TwAiO tool in 2014 on them without this type of symptom in any of them prior to this latest version, there simply is not a conflict in my experience. I had not run the TwAiO tool on the two Win10 machines for about 6 months (i.e., several version updates), and when I did so last week it was immediately after running the battery of weekly malware scans on both. I'm certain it was the TwAiO tool which has produced the farkled situation, but what allowed one machine to become repaired with the battery of helpful commands you've provided and not the other, is just not clear and I may have to revert to the out-of-box OS and completely reconfigure it all over -- not a happy outcome.

Boggin · « **Reply #13 on:** January 23, 2019, 02:46:14 pm »

Is there any reason why you haven't updated that machine to 1809 ?

As an alternative to a factory reset, you could perform a repair install which doesn't affect personal stuff or installed programs, but the current ISO from https://www.microsoft.com/en-gb/software-download/windows10 is for 1809 and it took about 6hrs to update one of my machines from 1803 to 1809.

You could also try running the latest version of Windows Repair on it to see if that will undo the update problem.

Which build of Win 10 would you get if you did factory reset it ?

jhvance · « **Reply #14 on:** January 24, 2019, 08:28:17 am »

It has not yet been offered the 1809 update, and I haven't had time to mess with trying to force it -- it's a model with memory & storage constraints which can't be modified (Toshiba didn't build those particular cl15 models with more than a 32 Gb base non-upgradeable SSD), and the whole-hog approach MS adopted with Win10 renders each major update is a true PITA to achieve successfully (often involving offload of installed apps to gain sufficient space). Had I known it was going to be such a problem machine, I wouldn't have bought it despite its bargain price and being a handy tool for portable use. I don't remember what the original build was, but the laptop is 3 years old so in the 15xx series, I think.

The last time it got farkled in a major Windows update I had to go back to the original image from a USB stick from Toshiba and rebuild from that -- not particularly looking forward to re-doing that process (but may have to), so when I get time over the next few days I'll try the repair install approach.

Boggin · « **Reply #15 on:** January 24, 2019, 10:26:15 am »

I came across a few on another forum which is closed now who had bought new Win 10 laptops with just those 32GB HDDs and found they were getting an error of insufficient space when it came to updates.

I advised them to take them back as not being fit for purpose.

An alternative would be to buy a larger drive.

My Toshiba laptops date back to 2010 and 2011 with each having a 64GB HDD.

Last year I had to replace the HDD on one and I bought a 1TB one but when I loaded the HDD with the system image I ended up with 350GB of unallocated space, but because they had been upgraded to Win 10, the Win 10's 480MB recovery partition was immediately to the right of C: so I had to factory reset back to Win 7 to extend that to C: and then reinstall Win 10 and every thing that entailed.

Prior to upgrading to Win 10 I had created Toshiba Win 7 recovery disks and removed the recovery partition and created a system image, so I didn't have to remove all of the bloat, but quite a few programs needed updating.

jhvance · « **Reply #16 on:** January 28, 2019, 01:23:47 pm »

There is simply no way to expand the internal SSD or RAM on this particular model; at this point Office Depot wouldn't take it back, and Toshiba's US operation has been so decimated it's doubtful there is much opportunity for relief from that perspective. The upgrade process insists it must have 8 Gb on the drive, and won't even offer the option to utilize additional memory on an attached (and recognized in Explorer) 64 Gb USB drive which has been formatted to NTFS. The OS itself takes up almost 25 Gb, so there is simply no way to continue with that process -- it won't get beyond that 8 Gb-reduction demand when I run the MS 1809 Media Creation Tool, and so I seem to be in a "Catch-22" situation of the worst sort.

I really appreciate all your efforts but it seems I'm just SOL and am going to reinstall Panda Dome (so I have some sort of functional AV), then ignore the Defender updates until I can figure out how to prevent the OS from even checking for those and preclude it from failing to process other, legitimate updates its capable of handling within the limited memory. I'll be making some acerbic comments about this situation on any MS-related forums, to be sure.

Boggin · « **Reply #17 on:** January 28, 2019, 02:32:47 pm »

Yes, I forgot that on those 32GB drive machines, the drive is built into the motherboard.

How long have you had the machine ?

You can free up some space by turning off Hibernate with the cmd powercfg -h off and turn it back on by changing off to on in that cmd.

Checking the free space on the drive before running the cmd and then after will tell you how much you have freed up.

jhvance · « **Reply #18 on:** February 04, 2019, 02:03:31 pm »

Well, this issue is now resolved so the thread can be closed.

No matter how I approached the repair or upgrade process, none of the usual avenues would allow the 1809 upgrade installation to proceed because of storage space limitations it perceived even if I was doing it from a USB and launched the 1809 setup.exe directly under an administrator account. So, having a USB drive of the original out-of-box image and learning that the 1809 upgrade would apply to all previous versions of Windows 10, I simply nuked the laptop with the original image -- after it rebooted and walked me through the initial setup of user accounts, I proceeded to immediately rebuild its fresh OS with application of the 1809 upgrade. That has proven successful, and I've since run the built-in cleaners to remove unneeded storage, and jettisoned the old Windows to gain a lot more free space than I ever had previously. It might not be the normal routine I'll follow, but perhaps when farkling reaches such a terminal-effort level of the OS it's more time-consuming but a lot less frustrating in the end.

Boggin · « **Reply #19 on:** February 04, 2019, 02:08:54 pm »

You may face a similar problem with other updates, but at least you now have the latest version.

Did you also turn off Hibernation as I'd suggested which will save a few more GBs ?

jhvance · « **Reply #20 on:** February 05, 2019, 11:53:19 am »

I have turned off hibernation now, thanks.