Windows Update Error 0x80071A91, 0x80070643 and Free Space

Published by Torry Crass on

For those of us who still work through some of these technical issues on occasion, I ran into a rather tricky one over the course of the past few months related to updating. This was a problem that had me stuck for a few days and happened when I was tring to install a set of several recent updates.

A set of these included KB3033890, KB2952664, KB3068708, KB3059317, KB3057839, KB3063858, and KB3058515.

Now, it should be noted that while I included the KB entries for the updates, I am not convinced that it was the updates actually causing the problem but rather a problem with the update software or update process on my system because the fix for me didn't involve removing or changing up the KB installations in any way, as you'll see.

The short version is that on every update attempted, even as individual installs through updates or through manually downloading the installation file and running it, the updates always failed out, tyipcally with error: 0x80071A91 or 0x80070643.

Some recommendations involved removing .NET framework all together using removal tools, simply searching for that tool is easy enough so I'm not including the link. Another couple recommended Microsoft provided Fix-It utilities, two of them:

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/948252

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/939399

While these might work in some cases (based on comments) they failed out in mine forcing me to continue to search for a valid solution. Then I found a couple of commands that covered two things I was looking to solve. Low drive space and a solution to the update problem.

The following command helped to clean up drive space resulting in several extra GB of space being freed:

DISM /online /Cleanup-Image /SpSuperseded

The next command is the one that actually revived my update installations to functional:

fsutil resource setautoreset true C:\

After both of these commands were run, I gave my system another reboot for good measure and ran the update process once more to see successful installations come up. If these happen to fail, another couple suggestions would be to run a checkdisk or the command below since some people shared that those tools were successful for them.

SFC /SCANNOW

And we updated, happily ever after! Milage may vary for others. =)


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