Hyper-V fails to uninstall in Windows 8 Pro

Question

I have a windows 8 Pro machine that has Hyper-V installed on it. Now, the developer wants to virtualize with Vagrant instead, but is having problems with 64-bit machines throwing an error. This appears to be because Hyper-V is installed.

When I go to uninstall Hyper-V via the windows features dialog, I'm prompted to reboot. During the reboot, I see a message briefly that look something like "fatal error C00000d4" but the machine boots too quickly for me to read anything else.

Unfortunately I'm primarily a linux sysadmin here so I don't know how to proceed. I've searched the event viewer but the only thing that I can see that looks like it might be related is an error:

Log Name:      System
Source:        Service Control Manager
Date:          2013-03-11 4:30:34 PM
Event ID:      7023
Task Category: None
Level:         Error
Keywords:      Classic
User:          N/A
Computer:      Renegade
Description:
The Windows Modules Installer service terminated with the following error: 
The system cannot move the file to a different disk drive.
Event Xml:
<Event xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/win/2004/08/events/event">
  <System>
    <Provider Name="Service Control Manager" Guid="{555908d1-a6d7-4695-8e1e-26931d2012f4}" EventSourceName="Service Control Manager" />
    <EventID Qualifiers="49152">7023</EventID>
    <Version>0</Version>
    <Level>2</Level>
    <Task>0</Task>
    <Opcode>0</Opcode>
    <Keywords>0x8080000000000000</Keywords>
    <TimeCreated SystemTime="2013-03-11T20:30:34.831647800Z" />
    <EventRecordID>6314</EventRecordID>
    <Correlation />
    <Execution ProcessID="520" ThreadID="600" />
    <Channel>System</Channel>
    <Computer>Renegade</Computer>
    <Security />
  </System>
  <EventData>
    <Data Name="param1">Windows Modules Installer</Data>
    <Data Name="param2">%%17</Data>
    <Binary>540072007500730074006500640049006E007300740061006C006C00650072000000</Binary>
  </EventData>
</Event>

This looks like it might be related to ProgramData having been moved onto a non-ssd drive during windows install, but I have no idea whether it's related to the failure of the Hyper-V feature to uninstall.

Can someone point me in the right direction here? Either to get the real error I'm receiving, or force Hyper-V to uninstall or... anything?

I'm also having this issue. I also have my ProgramData on another drive. — Chris Watts, Mar 26 '13 at 14:09

score 2 · Accepted Answer · answered Mar 26 '13 at 17:24

I eventually worked around this.

Go to the recovery console (or use some way to edit your filesystem without Windows running). Move the ProgramData folder onto the C drive and create a symlink to it on the drive it was originally on (this prevents everything else from breaking) Reboot, and run the uninstall. It should succeed. Go back to the recovery console and move the ProgramData folder back to its

What I ended up doing was moving ProgramData back to the C drive (using the recovery console), symlinking it back to the drive it was originally on, running the uninstall (successfully) and then going back to the recovery console to move it back.

Since that worked, it's probably safe to assume that there's a hardcoded C:\ProgramData path somewhere in uninstaller (instead of reading it from the registry key).

Hyper-V fails to uninstall in Windows 8 Pro

1 Answers1