I often do my SharePoint setups on virtual machines since I need to build them up and tear them down frequently. Hyper-V is a beauty when it comes to demo environments. A few weeks ago I was doing an install and got an error that was absolutely no help.
[error]Microsoft SharePoint Server 2013 encountered an error during setup.[/error]
Well thanks. That’s completely unhelpful. To the installation logs!!
[error]Error: Failed to install product: D:globaloserver.MSI ErrorCode: 1603(0x643).[/error]
Note that your error message may list a different drive letter.
Well that’s a little better but not 100% helpful. Luckily I’ve run into this in the past and the fix for me was pretty simple at the time. I mentioned the fact that this was a virtual environment earlier for a reason. I setup my VMs with only a single virtual processor by default when I’m doing configuration. All I needed to do was switch from 1 processor to 2 (or 4, or 6, I’ve found any even number will work fine in my tests) and everything worked perfectly. After the installation if you want to switch back down to 1 processor everything should continue to function properly.
I’ve seen other people talking about modifying configuration files or registry entries, but if I can fix the issue just by changing the number of virtual processors then I’m going for that!
Happy SharePoint adventures!
I worked with Microsoft Engineers to find the root cause of the error. We discovered a missing registry key at HKLM:SOFTWAREPoliciesMicrosoftWindowsInstaller
I wrote a fix script and posted it on our Blog: http://www.devfacto.com/resolved/
Just had this issues as well on my VM with 4 processors.
Turned out that you cannot have other VMs running if they all together use more processors than available in the host.
So shutting down one of the other VMs solved the problem.