The Berryware Blog

Windows Update Fails After Cloning to New 750GB Hard Drive March 2, 2012

This is going to be a pretty lengthy blog post, so I’ll start with an executive summary for those that don’t need all the gory details:

1. I ordered a new 750GB Western Digital Scorpio Black hard drive to upgrade my Sony VGN-FW390Y laptop (it came with a 320GB when I originally bought it).
2. There was an unnecessary amount of pain involved in getting my system upgraded.
3. I’d like to help reduce that pain for anyone else who may embark on this challenging mission!
4. If the Sony recovery disks fail half way through setting up the new drive (Sony says if you purchase a new disc at +/-$50 it should work but I didn’t try this):

• Set up an old “legacy” (pre-Advanced Format) drive using the recovery discs.
• Install hot fix 2470478 (whether you’re running Vista or Windows 7).
• Intel Rapid Storage Technology driver with version greater than 9.6 (I used 10.8 because it was the newest).
• Clone this drive to the new Advanced Format drive (I used Clonezilla).

Don’t you hate it when you know how the story ends? Actually the journey is the “fun” part, especially with this one…

I recently upgraded my Sony VGN-FW390 personal laptop with a 750GB Western Digital Scorpio Black hard drive. Since my older Hitachi 320GB was also a SATA I figured the upgrade would be painless. Well… This process consumed all of my spare time for four straight days!! At the end of this all I’ve only got my laptop’s bundled software up and running, none of the other apps that I use. The main problem was getting Windows Update working.

I started off trying to use the Sony recovery discs on the new drive… This failed because the software couldn’t handle the new drive. I was given the option of buying new recovery discs for $51 from Sony but didn’t like that idea because I’d also have to wait for them to be shipped to me.

Next approach… Do the recovery install on the old drive and clone it. I used Clonezilla for the clone job and it worked pretty well without costing me anything. Well… Not quite as well as I thought.. Windows Update was broken (and it would prove to be an Intel problem, not Clonezilla but remember that this was my first time trying Clonezilla so I couldn’t rule it out as the guilty party!). OK, no big deal… We’ll fix the core problem… It even had a unique error code displayed (0xC8000247), so it should be easy to find a fix by googling… *WRONG*!! This was only the second day- it would take another 2 days to finally solve this one.

Googling revealed so many different things to try but it became clear that the problem centered around one thing: I had an Advanced Format drive, otherwise known as a 512e or 4K sector drive, and this caused problems for Vista (and Windows 7). Essentially these hard drives went from the standard 512 byte to 4 KB size sectors and some software made assumptions that this sector size would not change once the system had been installed. A few things to try were:

• Re-register DLLs to get Windows Update working
• Remove the corrupted SoftwareDistribution database folder so it will be re-created
• Run WD Align tool after cloning
• Install Vista hot fix 2470478 before cloning

There were others and none of them worked… I must’ve cloned drives 10 times in total before finding the solution: the Intel Rapid Storage Technology driver needed to be updated to version 9.6 or newer, but it also required the 2470478 hot fix. I installed version 10.8- I recommend that you do this before cloning. How do you know if you need this driver? Not 100% sure, but it seems as if many Advanced Format drives need it and the Western Digitial 750GB I bought was one of them.

Some other useful info (especially for those who are searching for solutions to this problem):

• You may see error 8024A000 (or maybe 0x8024A000) when running windows update (depending on what SP level you’re on)
• You may see error 0xC8000222 in windowsupdate.log if you try to install the hot fix mentioned above after cloning. You may have even seen this error when trying to install something else after cloning- generally, installation using Windows Installer technology is essentially broken until you go through the procedure I outlined above. If you’re looking at windowsupldate.log you’ll see an entry like this: “DtaStor FATAL: Failed to initialize datastore, error = 0xC8000222″.
• Another one is 0x8004117F – The Windows Search Service cannot open the JET property store.
• You’ll probably see a CAPI2 event log entry like this: the cryptographic services failed to initialize the catalog database.  The ESENT error was: -583.
• Another search service error number: 2147749155 (0x8004D0D23).
• Another error message: “the content server cannot update or access information because of a database error.”

The way I figured out this solution was in part because I stumbled upon a forum discussion where this article was linked- thank you HP and the guy that posted the link! (http://tinyurl.com/4pxp2pn)

I should add that this could probably happen with hardware from any company, not just Sony, and it can also happen with other Advanced Format drives, not just Western Digital.  I saw postings where people talked about Seagate drives as well (just one example).