Okay, I know that this isn’t exactly SharePoint, but it’s kinda’ related. Our team was working on setting up a virtual SharePoint infrastructure on a Windows 2008 R2 host…domain controller, SQL Server, SharePoint Server, Exchange Server, ISA Server, etc…and we were getting bit with an error during the installation of R2 on our first VM.
We started by creating a VM in Hyper-V and mounting the D: drive (DVD) with the installation disk installed. The VM would boot up and start the setup process, but would never get through the installation portion of setup. You know, the part of setup that occurs after selecting the partition you want to install on. We were getting errors like these:
The file or directory e:\windows\assembly\NativeImages_v2.0.50727_64\System.EnterpriseSe#\a3af29f85ea516622318918d50118d2is corrupt and unreadable. Please run the Chkdsk utility.
Windows cannot install required files. The file may be corrupt or missing. Make sure all files required for installation are available, and restart the installation. Error code: 0x80070570
Heck, we couldn’t even understand where the E: drive was coming from! In the physical machine, the E: drive is just another standalone disk drive…it had nothing to do with the installation we were doing on the K: drive. It sure seemed like our installation disk was corrupt. So, we changed our installation method and mounted the ISO image and attempted to install from the ISO image. Same (or similar error messages).
In our VM we were specifying a 10Gb VHD, which should be large enough to install Windows 2008 R2 (in fact, after we did get it installed, we had about 2Gb free). It seems, by default, that the VM was being created with a dynamically expanding hard disk so, on a lark, we created a fixed disk of 10Gb. Lo and behold, the installation continued successfully!
I know others have installed the OS on a dynamically expanding hard disk, so I’m not sure why our problem was so unique. Perhaps it was because the physical hard drive we were installing on was on its way out. Turns out our physical hard drive started giving us some real problems later on, but we were able to copy our VM to another drive and boot it up from there. We still need to run some diagnostics on the questionable drive so I’ll update this post when I find out whether SeaTools thinks the drive is bad or not.
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