Troubleshoot Installation and Upgrade Issues for Patch My PC Publisher

Applies to: Patch My PC Publisher V3.x

This section provides guidance for troubleshooting issues that may occur during the installation or upgrade of Patch My PC (PMPC) Publisher.

These troubleshooting steps help ensure a successful installation or upgrade of Publisher.

• Publisher Fails to Upgrade

• Error 1714/1612 - The older version of Patch My PC Publishing Service cannot be removed

Publisher Fails to Upgrade

At the end of a sync, if a new version of Publisher is available, Publisher attempts to install the update by default. When this occurs, the following entry appears in the PatchMyPC.log file at the end of the sync.

Starting self-update, the command line is: MsiExec.exe /i C:\WINDOWS\TEMP\PatchMyPC-Publishing-Service.msi /qn /log C:\WINDOWS\TEMP\PatchMyPC-Publishing-Service_Upgrade.log

Note

If you see errors such as "An error occurred with the SignalR connection" logged around the time illustrated above, this is normal while some services stop and start again during the update process.

If a failure occurs during the self-update process and Alerts are configured, a notification is generated. The notification will appear similar to the screenshots shown below

To understand the root cause of the upgrade failure, inspect the log file indicated in PatchMyPC.log produced by the MSI installer:

• C:\WINDOWS\TEMP\PatchMyPC-Publishing-Service_Upgrade.log

Note

See Error 1714 for more details on common causes for upgrade failures.

Error 1714/1612 - The older version of Patch My PC Publishing Service cannot be removed

When searching upwards from the bottom of the PatchMyPC-Publishing-Service_Upgrade.log log file for return value 3, you might see lines similar to the following:

Action start 05:37:07: RemoveExistingProducts.
CustomAction  returned actual error code 1612 (note this may not be 100% accurate if translation happened inside sandbox)
MSI (s) (80:D4) [05:37:07:238]: Product: Patch My PC Publishing Service -- Error 1714. The older version of Patch My PC Publishing Service cannot be removed.  Contact your technical support group.  System Error 1612.
Error 1714. The older version of Patch My PC Publishing Service cannot be removed.  Contact your technical support group.  System Error 1612.

When you attempt to manually install the update by downloading and running the latest .msi, you receive a dialogue similar to the one below:

The 1612 error code is usually thrown when the original installation media for the currently installed application is no longer available on the system - something has deleted it.

Typically, .msi files cache themselves in the C:\Windows\installer folder, and the original .msi file is critical for any application update, repair, or uninstall.

The Windows Installer service first looks in the .msi of the currently installed version in C:\Windows\installer folder, and also its last known install location - the self-updater is downloaded and launched from the C:\Windows\temp folder.

Tip

You can read more about system error code 1612 in the following knowledge base article: System Error 1612 – The installation source for this product is not available.

If you encounter this issue, you can resolve it by re-caching the missing .msi file:

1. Download the .msi file for the current version you have installed.

2. Recache the .msi file using the following command:

msiexec /fvomus "C:\path\to\PatchMyPC-Publishing-Service.msi" /qn

1. Attempt the update again, and it should now be successful.

We do not currently publicly host the installers for older versions of Publisher, so we advise you to open a technical support case requesting a copy for the version you need.

After resolving the issue, we strongly recommend you investigate any cleanup scripts or other automations that may be deleting files from the C:\Windows\installer folder to prevent the issue from recurring.