Wednesday, November 6, 2013

The detection failed, this can be due to a corrupted installation database (Sharepoint 2007)

If for some reason, you get this error, be afraid, very afraid :-)

In my case it was installing SP3 for Sharepoint 2007.

It means, probably that someone deleted files from C:\windows\Installer to save some space. Some places will tell you that you need to remove the server from the farm and reinstall the OS, or some other way to solve this, well the following is a much better solution, that at least for me it worked fine.

The post isn't avaliable in the blog already, but way back machine was able to find it, and you can download the VBS, etc.

http://web.archive.org/web/20111010084932/http://moss2007.kbnk.info/Patching/solved-the-detection-failed-this-can-be-due-to-a-corrupted-installation-database.html

Basically you will get all packages from c:\windows\Installer folder from another server, and copy them to a repository. After that, you will run a script that will get all missing packages from that repository and put them back on the \Installer  folder.

All script files and info on the link above.