Patch Lady – tool to diagnose feature update issues @ AskWoody

Patch Lady – tool to diagnose feature update issues

Posted on April 2, 2018 at 20:58 CDT by Susan Bradley • Comment in the Forums

With 1803 expected to be out any day, Microsoft has released to the IT pro community a new tool to help parse out why a feature update has been unsuccessful.

The tool checks 26 rules and helps to identify what the issue is. On my successfully updated Windows 10 1709 the log file came back indicating I had no issues (which is expected). It is geared toward the IT crowd and thus geared towards being used in scripting, thus don’t expect a GUI in this tool. When you click on it and run it, it will dump the file log in wherever you downloaded and ran the tool from. It then parses out the Setupact.log file to diagnose issues.

Which reminds me about a key folder to keep an eye on when upgrading …the Panther folder.

This information about setup log file locations still applies:

Setupact.log

Primary log file for most errors that occur during the Windows installation process. There are several instances of the Setupact.log file, depending on what point in the installation process the failure occurs. It is important to know which version of the Setupact.log file to look at, based on the phase you are in.

Setup (specialize): X:\Windows\panther

Setup (OOBE), LogonUI, OEM First Run:%windir%\panther

Windows Welcome (OOBE): %windir%\panther\unattendGC

The Panther file location is a key location used during the upgrading process. Don’t ask me exactly where the name “Panther” came from, there’s probably a story long ago from some product manager who used to work at Microsoft. But bottom line, I’ll be trying out that tool and see if I can use it to better diagnose feature release upgrade issues.

[As an aside, speaking of long ago product managers with stories about how things were named, one of my favorites is the story about “Squeaky Lobster” the name given to a diagnostic counter tool in Exchange.]

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