I have fixed hundreds of issues in many pcs (hardware and software related) over the years, but for this problem I had to format and reinstall windows. When I was searching as well, I found few that managed to solve the problem and thus, you might have a chance.

Like you, didn't want to format my pc, but after more than a year with the problem the day came where couldn't install some software that needed for my work and couldn't postpone it anymore. On the upside, it presented a chance to clean up and organize everything better.

gl

ps: make a backup, find some time and take the big step

Snarl

Damn. Fuck it.

The problem is not even the personal stuff folders, those are quite light and i already keep them organized for the eventuality of a formatting. A simple copy and paste to an external drive, and i have a backup in minutes.

The problem is all the drivers and programs. All the motherboard, chipset, lan drivers, the nvidia one and then having to create the specific game profiles again in nvidia control panel; export browser backup, reimport, and of course having to reinstall all the games included the 100+ gb ones like gta, quake and such.

What a pain in the ass. And a failure of operative system. In 20 years it's only gotten worse and worse. Ever more sluggish, less reactive and crisp, less stable, less reliable, less logically organized.

Without even entertaining the spiware nature of the whole thing, there's too much to say about all that.

it might be russian hackers fucking up your pc beyond its ability to update, if system files were replaced it probably lost ability to update itself so only clean reinstall helps. it is quite common for certain people get periodically hacked due to their perceived activity on the internet, b e it political activity or other stuff of that nature, and they do all kinds of stuff, btw i dont think its just random hackers, perhaps govt agencies, so it is a bad sign. i just do reinstall and fuck up my social media in attempt they dont bother me. as i understand some people like snowden put it they just press a button and you fully secure system gets roayly infected with spyware and it takes a lot of effort to fix it over if its not latest windows running on latest hardware with all securitry updates/features working like the stuff they try to do with win11 in form of forcing tpm.

government asks ms and intel along other companies to add backdoors, they dont actually add it themselves hence you hear it in the news that they want to add backdoors, ms is a private company, they don't actually care about private stuff like emails etc, same with other companies, they use private information for ads and bettering their services, they don't seek that information the way spy agency work to find dirt on you so they leverage it against you the way they see fit. so no its not ms fault when you get your info stolen although it is partly their but thet they simply dont have resources to be able to protect every single pc on the planet from being attacked by these goons.

ie private information is much more valueble to govt agencies like nsa or fsb and the likes rather to some corporation which just wants to sell you products.

Uh, that's new to me. Windows is mostly spiware itself, so i don't understand why they'd go to that hassle.

Even the cpus are designed and built with mandatory easily accessible backdoors, the operative system on top of that is just a gigantic, sluggish mass of spiwares with "free" everyday use tools tossed on top of that.

Why would they go as far as directly sabotaging it, when it already does the job better when it's working perfectly? I don't get it.

I have Windows only for QC (even before the latest update it ran even worse through WINE/Proton than on Windows) and I'm also stuck.

For me this started with 2004. I couldn't update 1903 to 2004 (thought I'd try out VRR and GPU scheduling), so I tried 1909 and that worked just fine. Which I immediately tried to update to 2004 again, and that failed. I'm stuck on 1909 forever.

I've tried 20H2 and 21H1, no luck. Now, since 1909 reached its EOL, this shit is trying to update itself every few days in the background, and since I only boot it to play an hour of QC, it's frustrating as hell.

My problem started with 2004's installer. It does something to the drivers that earlier versions' installers didn't do.

I'm a complete Windows noob (but hey, it's supposed to be all easy and automatic so even my grandma would fix it by clicking one button, right?), but I already figured out more than any of the magic SEO sites, Microsoft's "knowledge" base or their gamified "support" site [1] tell about the error it's giving me.

So I get error 0x80070057 and no amount of googling will tell you what the issue is or how to solve it (you get the usual list of useless scan&fix tools, as you know best!) However, because the standalone updater leaves a log file, turns out it's "invalid argument" when trying to access driver store. And sure enough, running "pnputil -e" fails with an error (as does https://github.com/lostindark/DriverStoreExplorer - sounded promising, but useless in this case). If anyone knows of a solution, please speak up ;)

[1] Same story as with other webshit like Stack Overflow - an army of Indians collect points and badges for getting accepted answers, which is not just welcome but became necessary for job interviews in recent years. So 1. they race to easy questions, 2. they mass-copy-paste irrelevant crap basic instructions without even looking at an issue, 3. they give very very bad advice that qualify as solutions on a technicality (i.e. the victim's problem changed, therefore this one was solved ;)).

The most annoying for me was https://www.codeproject.com/ where you can find programming articles from Indians having 5 stars on basic coding concepts, which apart from not adding anything to anyone's understanding, they are sometimes even wrong... and yet, they have perfect scores from 100 voters. When I was reading articles from there, I preferred articles with lower scores, like 3.5 out of 5, but with authors from other countries, since the ratings of articles written from Indian authors were meaningless.

Again: this is the effect of gamification of these sites, which recruiters allow and encourage as proof of skill or experience. So you get people using every possible way to bump up those scores artificially. Don't blame the players, blame the game...

If you are not too tech savy or not into fiddling with windows core, I recommend you just reset your windows installation, with the option: "Keep personal files, apps, and Windows settings".
It's the easiest and safest way, everything will be there as how it is now, but your update will work.

edit.: be advised that it will turn on some annoying "features" like cloud based antivirus or smartscreen, etc. which can mess with your installed apps/games, so make sure you check your settings after the process is complete.

Yes, maybe i wasn't clean enough but i've already tried that. It'd be cool if it did. Instead it goes trough the whole process, it downloads the os, prepares the installation, launches it, blue menu, percentage goes up, reaches 100, it restarts the pc, and..... nothing changes, everything is literally the same and there's a message telling you something went wrong and it didn't work. Thanks for nothing, very cool.

Are you doing it wrong? You have to make a pendrive with the media creation tool and start the setup from that pendrive inside Windows. It literaly reinstalls the core OS, it should work.

There is a way to investigate what went wrong, but first please try the inplace upgrade if you didn't.

ps.: I posted a link for Lam below if you happen to have the option greyed out.

Hmm, i'll try that again but it takes some time. Between others i also used the "reinstall" method, i think we're talking about the same thing. It's an option that theorically reinstall the entire os, theorically wiping out all errors/viruses/whatever, but leaving the personal stuff you had intect unlike a clean formatting.

Yes, please also use the utility (or a similar one from github) what I linked to get rid of the update junks before your do. gl.

Posting anonymous because i'm not on my browser. Ok, now i'm getting angry.

I've tried the classic recovery/reset tools again and obviously they didn't work.

So i pulled the trigger and launched a general format. Whatever, as long as it allows me to fix it.

I formatted the os, and the first thing i did with the virgin, freshly installed OS is to launch the update tool to update all the security tools and the update block, included the infamous 20H2 one.

Funnily enough, to download and install that update block took longer than to install the entire OS from scratch, but whatever.

Here comes the punchline....... it didn't work! The update fails to install on literallly a virgin, freshly installed OS!

Let me repeat, i installed the OS from scratch, there's no junk, it's a virgin OS..... and it STILL isn't able to install the version 20H2!

The error code is 0xc1900101

What do i do now? Could it help to flash the bios?

yes update your bios if there is a newer version available

Update: i flashed the bios to the latest version and that did the trick, for anyone else that might have the same issue.

I say might because i didn't change anything else and suddenly it accepted any update.

It shouldn't make sense, but here we are.

Now it's all fine, but it's been a gigantic pain in the ass

Thanks to everyone that suggested something, hope this'll help someone else.

1. There's no such option - resetting the installation removes all apps and settings, only personal files can be spared. That option was there in the old installation media (when you chose how to upgrade say Win 7->10), but nowadays even that option doesn't exist - the installer will just tell you to update online if you want to keep anything. And online update doesn't work.

2. Also, the reset operation requires a recovery disk which no one ever makes :)

Why would I suggest a solution which doesn't exist? I don't know what is happening in your system, so this is is just a wild guess, but you are probably missing the option because of this?:

https://www.winhelponline.com/blog/windows-10-20h2-inplace-upgrade-keep-personal-files-grayed-out/

This is a screen from the _online_ upgrade tool which doesn't work on our systems (we've tried multiple times, believe me). Of course those options exist there, aren't greyed out, you start the upgrade, it does stuff for an hour or so, gets to like 97% and spits out an error (after rolling everything back).

But you told us to do a Windows "reset". That lives in the Settings "app" (and looks different, how can you confuse the two) and doesn't have those options (it's meant to remove all installed programs, its whole purpose is to be a full fresh installation, before selling a computer for example).

Sorry if it was confusing, my mistake! I quoted the required option, so one could google, I just used "reset" for the meaning.

Setup makes logs, where it can be investigated what went wrong, but first I would just try to reset windows update, reboot and try the inplace repair (with the usb created with the media creation tool).

This one for example: https://github.com/ManuelGil/Script-Reset-Windows-Update-Tool

Does it stuck with clean-boot too?

By clean boot you mean safe mode? That's the first thing I tried before I found the underlying problem, but it makes no difference. All the dism /whatever, sfc /whatever steps were done. I also tried it in VirtualBox so Nvidia, Realtek and whatever other crap isn't loaded, was worth a try ;) Only then I started investigating deeper.

I already wrote above what the underlying problem is in my case. If you're an actual Windows Wizard, I can generate fresh log and send you, but there should be no need, as I have it pinpointed pretty well from those logs.

To repeat: my case is "invalid parameter" in driver store access. I can confirm without re-running the update that `pnputil -e` fails with invalid parameter, as well as running the DriverStoreExplorer tool (maybe I'll pretend to be a moron and report it as their bug and they'll tell me what to do? ;))

Remember:
- everything regarding drivers works: I keep updating drivers just fine, I got Snappy Driver Installer (https://sdi-tool.org/) and it shows drivers for all hardware and available updates/suggested downgrades (I won't upgrade/downgrade anything since everything works perfectly, I just thought I'll check if it crashes or something, but no)
- up to and including 1909 (which I got stuck on), the installer didn't use that API and proceeded to update the system just fine; the problem started with version 2004

I didn't use that tool specifically (but tried several guides and fixup tools), but I can already tell you it won't do anything, because:
- I have no issue with Windows Update. It works, it still downloads updates every day, which now also includes the 20H2 major upgrade and that gets downloaded and running
- whether it's Windows Update initiating the update, or the standalone update assistant (cba checking English name, the one you showed before), under the hood they're downloading and running the installer (Windows Setup or something?) and that one is failing, not Windows Update.

So I'm looking for a fix for pnputil -e failing with invalid parameter, any pointers? :)

PS.

C:\Windows\System32\DriverStore\FileRepository exists.

It has oldest directories from 2019-03-19 05:50 (a lot of them, no way I had Windows running at 6 am Monday/Tuesday, must be some timezone shift) and newest from just a few days ago when I installed a new driver version (again: everything works! :))

It's 10 GB in size (earlier in the year I investigated which Nvidia driver exactly started showing artifacts in QC, so there's several Nvidia driver versions there ;)).

But Disk Cleanup in admin mode says "Device driver packages" take up exactly 0 bytes (yeah right) and telling it to clean them regardless does nothing to that directory.

- I only read OP post replies and the replies to me (including yours), not the entire thread, so I did not know:/

- I'm definitely no WIndows Wizard (are those exist?), but I do have a bunch of MS certs if those worth anything.

- Clean boot is not safe mode. It's when you only load ms stuff to start windows in normal mode.

- I assumed your are long done with the usual steps like sfc.exe or dsim.exe to check and repair the OS files, and that's why I suggested that utility, to wipe folders like FileRepository, and let the OS only download what is needed at this moment. This is best done when nothing else is running but ms stuff, hence I suggested it.

- These are the logs you want to check: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/deployment/upgrade/log-files, I understand you already pinpointed what is the problem in your case (probably it's in setupapi.dev.log), but I'm curious if the problem is the same when the inplace reinstall fails at 97%? (I can take a look at the logs, but only around the next weekend, this one going to be very busy)

ps: I rarely do desktops nowadays, but I did have to fix a problem similar to yours around the 2004 update, reinstall was not an option. It was involving fixing core OS permissions (actualy it involved giving some to the running user as well where it shouldn't have, only to make the update happen), it was nasty and definitely not something I would recommend to anybody, not worth it.

Yeah, nex1 didn't exactly say what errors he's getting, I joined the frustration venting party, but also specified the error it gives me (his situation might be different). My error 0x80070057 seems to have lots of people affected but no one offering a solution, which generates so much noise online that even after pinpointing the root cause (which is that Driver Store breakage), for the life of me I can't find any solution.

I check that tool out, it's handy for sure (everything in a single menu), but all it does is run the same things I've ran a thousand times. I don't know which option was supposed to clean up the DriverStore\FileRepository structure, but I've done dism /Online /Cleanup-Image /StartComponentCleanup and it doesn't touch that.

What I believe is supposed to clean that is the built-in Disk Cleanup tool (cleanmgr.exe), which again - shows 0 bytes and doesn't clean anything (it's known to be really sloppy, but 0 bytes? Perhaps the problem affects it too). Stronger option is https://github.com/lostindark/DriverStoreExplorer (linked before) but it errors out just like pnputil -e (the tool is basically a GUI frontend presumably using the same API as pnputil -e and then running pnputil -d on stuff you want to clean).

Also, another blind shot, I ran this blind driver cleanup batch which did a good job (DriverStore\FileRepository dropped to "only" 1,7 GB), but the problem remains :)

pnputil -e fails with invalid parameter

dism /online /get-drivers fails with error 87 but the log says

2021-07-30 20:19:41, Error DISM DISM Driver Manager: PID=2616 TID=5276 Failed to enumerating driver packages in the driver store. - CDmiDriverStore::GetDriverPackageCollection(hr:0x80070057)
2021-07-30 20:19:41, Error DISM DISM Driver Manager: PID=2616 TID=5276 Failed to generating the collection of packages in the image. - CDriverManager::GetDriverPackageCollection(hr:0x80070057)
2021-07-30 20:19:41, Error DISM DISM Driver Manager: PID=2616 TID=5276 Failed to get the out of box driver package collection from the driver store. - CDriverManager::Internal_DoListDriverPackages(hr:0x80070057)
2021-07-30 20:19:41, Error DISM DISM Driver Manager: PID=2616 TID=5276 onecore\base\ntsetup\opktools\dism\providers\dmiprovider\dll\drivermanager.cpp:532 - CDriverManager::ExecuteCmdLine(hr:0x80070057)

Same error 0x80070057 as during any kind of upgrade attempt.

(Searching for these logs found yet another person with this symptom who... ended up performing a "fresh install" like everyone else, and crying how bad it will be to bring the system back to what he set it up for before. Fuck that!)

Assuming you're not an audio engineer or a designer of some sort, what games do you play?

Easier to get a DAW running on Linux (even if in a VM) than Quake Champions ;)

What is a DAW without cool, expensive plugins that you don't REALLY need but it's nice to have them? :^)

you might have outdated drivers that are incompatible with 20H2, we had to deal with that at work a lot


if you are up to date with drivers and still not working

first download the windows update assistant and try with that, but you might have tried that already

or you can try purging the update files

https://www.techradar.com/uk/how-to/software/operating-systems/how-to-fix-a-stuck-windows-update-1326307 7th option in this article


ALSO because this is a feature update it will dump your old windows folder into a windows.old folder and keep it for rollback, it will need approx 30GB on your c drive so if you havent got enough disk space for that it can be a cause of failure too

Have you considered going with Linux? Depending on your distribution of choice, things with gaming will be just as good or better than Windows.

With Valve going all in with the Deck, things are going to get better. A lot better.

As a Linux-only user for 25 years, I agree, but also disagree ;)

WINE and Valve are doing a great job. Proton even started supporting RTX! As I've promised in another thread, I'm giving Doom Eternal another chance and it works with RTX on! Of course I turned it off after checking, can't play 170 FPS slideshow! ;) But it just works™

Hooowever, QC never worked correctly, and with the new anti-cheat, it won't even start. Same for Diabotical (and EGS itself) when I checked. There are more examples of anti-cheat measures or Denuvo, but those two are examples relevant for ESR :)

Another problem is games like Control. Yes, this you can also play with RTX through Proton now, but to increase FOV you need Cheat Engine and a script. So I played that on Windows. Same with Wolfenstein 2 (TNC), needed some Russian hacks to disable bobbing and shit, so I played that on Windows as well.

I agree that Steam Deck, if successful, should eventually bring more of that "homebrew" to Linux, but you will always find examples of stuff available only for Windows.

Sure, I lied a bit.

protondb.com has plenty of less than stellar AAA entries. Clearly, not everything is perfect. Even with Quake Live, if you will. QC, on the other hand, is a complete disaster. Completely unplayable

It's true games with pervasive anti-cheat solutions are generally not well supported, with Valve promising they will fix that. Is that a good thing, though? I am not entirely sure.

I wish I could run Doom Eternal at 170 fps. Only have a gtx 1070 in my main rig while the much better rx 5700 is sort of rotting in my htpc build.

I just remembered I limit my 3080 to 170W (I experimented with performance/Watt for a bit, that's the sweet spot). Power unlocked, it can do 220 FPS with RTX on (1080p, DLSS blur off of course). Of course it's a well optimized Vulkan game, none of that DX12 rubbish, but I'm reporting back because I lied by mistake. Perhaps some Windows noob wanted to chime in saying it's slower in Proton (which it isn't, again: it's a Vulkan game), so let me clarify that shit works flawlessly in its natural habitat.

But on your second point: Valve can't promise anything. All they can do is politely ask game developers/publishers to either remove that crap or disable when running through Proton. They don't have much leverage right now (Steam Machines never really happened), so we hope Steam Deck will give them the leverage. We'll see, I'm optimistic as usual, but it won't fix ALL the problems.

(Where were you when I finally got the 3080 after 9 months of waiting, sold my 1080 Ti and all the participants in the auction were companies, clearly planning to resell that shit for profit... I was really disappointed, I thought I will be helping fix the fucking scalper market!)

I am glad you haven't bought into the DLSS fad. RTX is cool and all but yeah, performance isn't there.

Anyway...

But on your second point: Valve can't promise anything. All they can do is politely ask game developers/publishers to either remove that crap or disable when running through Proton. They don't have much leverage right now (Steam Machines never really happened), so we hope Steam Deck will give them the leverage. We'll see, I'm optimistic as usual, but it won't fix ALL the problems.

I am reasonably sure Valve has tried asking or felt they didn't have to ask because they already knew the answer. That's why they have taken things into their own hands. Maybe you've missed this one?

https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/steamdeck/faq

My game uses anti-cheat, which currently doesn’t work with Proton - how do I get around this for Steam Deck?
We’re working with BattlEye and EAC to get support for Proton ahead of launch.

As for 1080ti. I wasn't a believer when it was launched and people started buying them. I felt it was expensive. And it was. Man enough to admit I was wrong long term.

Anyway, I wouldn't have bought it. Almost sorry I didn't buy 6900XT for 1k euro late last year. It's a lot of money to throw on a video card I am not going to be using all that much since my new job is sucking me dry. These semiconductor guys are very demanding, I tell you what

I will get in reverse order because it's important:

-- 2 --

I had a top tier 980, my plan was to skip Pascal of course.

Then Turing got announced (I was super disappointed, even if I understood the reasoning [1]).

It was maddening: 2080 had performance of a 1080 Ti. But it was 1,5x more expensive. That shit made absolutely no sense, everyone was mad. No one bought that crap, except clueless idiots. [2]

Meanwhile Pascal prices were dropping down, it was the "previous generation", distributors and resellers don't follow benchmarks, they simply see a new generation show up and run a sale on the old one. That's when I struck (and many others, it was a fun time when only people "in the know" were scalping GPUs).

That's how I eneded up with a 1080 Ti with fat heatsinks, 4 fans and highest clocks (except HOF/K|NGP|N) for €750 or so.

Not only was the 1080 Ti the fastest card under €1000 for 2-3 years straight. For 6 or so months, if you could still get one new, it was the absolute performance/price king.

Like yourself, when 1080 Ti came out, I thought it was expensive (remember I had a 980, I got it for ~€400), but thought it will mean even more performance per buck really soon. I bet you were in the same camp. I was just very quick to react, secured a discounted 1080 Ti after Turing's release and even more lucky, sold it last month for twice the value I was assigning it (but still a third below what they sold a week or two earlier, from the same people who bought it from me - I was too honest about its history, pasted pictures of replacing fans with units from AliExpress that cost €100... apparently to sell on the Internet, you're expected to copy manufacturer's page with marketing bullshit and renderings instead of actual photos).

Aaaanyways...

Not sure how you were able (not sure about the wording - "you were able" implies you did it, but I know you didn't, what I mean is how the fuck you had this opportunity) to get a 6900 XT for €1k (that's below MSRP, isn't it?).

BUUUUUUUUUT, turns out I have a 3080 for €300 (cost of upgrade from a 1080 Ti, call it cheating but I'm fucking happy). Let's see who gets more frames in RTX games ;) Both of them! :D (OK, jokes aside, there's just one, Quake 2 RTX :) All the rest look better with old school shading)

Just kidding, I really wanted a 6800 XT (for me that would be first time in 15 years not using a proprietary driver, tainted kernel and all), but it simply didn't exist. Still doesn't.

-- 1 --

Valve can't "take things in their own hands". They don't develop games, they don't publish games, they only sell games.

So what they do instead is ask publishers to point them to developers, then they ask developers what do they need to make things happen. Developers say "fuck you, I worked on that Windows API for the last 70 years", so Valve asks "which one?" and implements it into Proton.

That's how their "taking things in their own hands" work. They have enough power to get to people who will tell them to fuck off, but provide technical details. But it's still Valve investing in emulating all the crap people are using, as well as maintaining bug-for-bug compatibility ;)



[1] Turing was supposed to introduce technology (RTX in this case) meant to keep iGPUs unsuitable for gaming. That was the whole reason behind RTX. It doesn't path trace (except Quake 2 RTX), it doesn't add any visual fidelity. The plan was to make AAA games require dedicated GPUs before things like Ryzen 7 5700G or i7-11600K get released. One could say this plan failed miserably, but they knew it could, that's exactly why they pushed it so early, absolutely worthless and unusable (back then and even now). The whole point was to make sure by 2024 (original plan: 2022 probably), lots of people will have RTX-whatever, so one day, a real AAA game will appear that requires a dedicated card, won't run on Steam Deck or 12900K or whatever AMD doesn't release to the public (remember 5700G STILL isn't available)

[2] It was deliberate. They fixed it with the "Super" line without losing a penny, at a time of their choosing. They waited half a year for the idiots to spend money on absolutely shit products. Then they released the "Super" series for people building new computers (similar, but slightly better performance/price than Pascal when it was new, but still absolute travesty when comparing new Turing vs used Pascal). Remember a year ago, when announcing Ampere, Jensen spent half an hour speaking specifically to Pascal owners, convincing us "this is an upgrade". It was very well directed. To this day I know in my heart he was speaking to me. That's why I sold 1080 Ti and got a 3080.

2. Yeah, it was possible to get a 6900XT for 1100 euro. Quite a "deal", considering the supply issues.

I have a very distinct memory of it, also a person that bought one at that price. So yeah.

1. Well yeah, that's what I mean about Valve. I also remember Carmack pretty much the same thing (that it's the only sane way looking forward) almost a decade ago. He was right

I just want my force feedback steering wheel to work properly, if it does I'll jump.

Have you tried making it work? I am not saying it will, mind you. Gaming hardware support is being added at a staggering pace these days

I'm planning this to be my diy project to fuck around with in September, I need to finish my exams for now :(

I know a lot of thrustmaster and logitech wheels work decently on linux but I have a diy wheel using the mmos firmware, I want to see if I can maybe fork Oversteer and make it work with it :3

I would download this.

https://www.tweaking.com/content/page/windows...n_one.html

its got loads of things which reset various permissions which might have become compromised.

Might be worth chucking that into dos too...

sfc /scannow

Maybe check the hosts file, disable firewall and reset permissions in case its blocking?

Otherwise just re-install, its not fun a fun process, but unlike a lot of others it will end with a positive outcome in a matter of hours.

Update: i flashed the bios to the latest version and that did the trick, for anyone else that might have the same issue.

I say might because i didn't change anything else and suddenly it accepted any update.

It shouldn't make sense, but here we are.

Now it's all fine, but it's been a gigantic pain in the ass

Thanks to everyone that suggested something, hope this'll help someone else.

Every windows new build just download the current iso for it so you have the correct files to fix any issues - windows iso downloaded - Rufus to mount it