Setup Wizard for Update Rollup 3 Ended Prematurely

Posted April 23, 2010

You receive the following message when installing Update Rollup 3 for Exchange Server 2010:

“Setup Wizard for Update Rollup 3 for Exchange Server 2010 (KB981401) ended prematurely because of an error. Your system has not been modified. To install this program at a later time, please run the installation again.”

exchange-2010-ru3-error.JPG

In my case this turned out to to be a User Account Control (UAC) gotcha.  Basically, I didn’t launch the *.msp file using “Run as Administrator”.  Interestingly, the error is misleading in that it does modify the system.  If you look at the installed updates on the system the Update Rollup appears as being installed.  In other words it is partly installed.

exchange-2010-ru3-error-2.JPG

The steps to resolve the issue are:

1. Go to Control Panel, Programs, Programs and Features, Installed Updates.  Highlight the update and then click Uninstall.

2. Open a CMD prompt using right-click “Run as Administrator”.  Browse to the folder where the file is located and launch the file named Exchange2010-KB981401-x64-en.msp.

One of these days I’m really going to get the hang of UAC :-) . Until I do, it would be really nice if the Microsoft product teams could provide more helpful error messages for UAC failures.

7 Comments so far

  1. DW Hunter on April 28th, 2010

    VERY Useful - ran into this problem tonight. Thank you!

    –DW

  2. frustrated on May 11th, 2010

    Domain Admin should assume full permissions. I’m so frustrated with things that should be easy, but take 4 steps just to make sure you have sufficient permissions to run it. But of course to get to the point that you realize you dont’ have sufficient resources, you run it, get a very generic email message and then spend 15 minutes combing message boards you find using Google… If I wanted this much trial, error and research I’d be using Linux…

  3. frustrated on May 11th, 2010

    Sorry, got caught up in my rant. What I meant to say first was thank you for sharing that helpful information, you saved me quite a bit of time.

  4. Admin on May 27th, 2010

    Thank’s for this post.
    I spent a lot of time on this problem!

  5. Derek on June 5th, 2010

    So, I also got the same problem and when I did the uninstall of the rollup 3, it got stuck at “Please wait while Windows configures Microsoft Exchange Server” for over an hour. I opened Services and all Exchange services are now disabled. I am about to cancel the rollup uninstall and it will be a disaster.

  6. Joedy on July 6th, 2010

    Thanks heaps helped me install the rollup

  7. Erich on August 6th, 2010

    Thank you for posting the solution for this frustrating behaviour. The same is true for rollup4, I lost some hours yesterday.

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