Windows 7: Service Pack 1 (SP1) installation error: 0x800F0A12

This may apply to imaged systems:

More...

I have used Acronis True Image Home 2011 to image and restore multiple Windows 7 installs and had no trouble upgrading them to SP1.
I wonder what third party disk management tool they are referring to.

It could be anything, including ATI, if the right circumstances occur. You might not have an issue but someone else may.

That is good to know. However, some people seem to have that error.

Here is one. At the moment I think GRUB was my problem.

I have this disk layout:
In addition, while installing Mint I also installed GRUB (on disk 2) which takes care of loading all the three OSes (I set the BIOS to boot from disk 2 instead of disk 1 which was the default) and everything has always worked great.

Yesterday, as I was normally using Windows 7 (so I first booted into GRUB then asked it to load Windows 7) I downloaded Windows 7 SP1 and tried to update.
It refused to install giving me that very same error (0x800f0a12).
I've tried several times to start the installer as administrator manually (which isn't required, as it asks anyway for elevation a little after it has been laubched) and to disconnect any other device that could interfer (like the disk I have on eSATA) to no avail.

To get it installed with no trouble, I had to restart the machine and enter the manual boot selector to make it bypass GRUB and boot directly into Windows 7 (don't ask me how I got to the conclusion GRUB was the problem, probably it was the beer).
By doing that, the SP1 installed flawlessly.

So, although I solved my problem, I'm here to ask if there's someone more educated than me that could explain me why it has failed in a way and has succeeded in another, seeing that I never moved the disk which Windows was installed on and the OS was just the very same.
I suppose (but it's really nothing more than a guess) that the installer didn't like the fact Windows 7 was not on the "main" boot disk, but I'm curious to know what triggered this kind of behaviour.

Thanks in advance to anyone who could answer this.. And of course also the little rep I can give

Hi Julio,

From what I understand, this error is caused by Windows Update being unable to access the system volume (an approx 200mb partition created during Windows 7 installation, normally inaccessible through the UI but available to the kernel). Apparently GRUB doesn't mount this volume.

More info from MS:

Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 Service Pack 1 (SP1) installation error: 0x800F0A12

Would you mind being a little more specific about how you resolved it? I haven't attempted SP1 yet but it looks like its going to be a prob for me also because I'm also using GRUB to dual boot on my laptop.

Thanks and cheers!

I guess you're talking about the 100MB partition that should have been created at startup?
Well, my "System reserved" partition is the whole 250GB partition which hosts the Windows 7 files (I followed this tutorial, especially method three, to avoid creating a primary partition for those system files as I had already planned to use all the 4 primary partitions with the scheme above).
The only difference I noticed is this: my system boots by default from the second hard disk (which is the one with GRUB), and it's GRUB that allows me to choose if I want to boot Windows 7, Windows XP or Linux.
So, the cases are two:

1) The case in which I start the PC normally:
2) The case in which I choose manually to boot from Disk 1:
So I came to the conclusion that Windows 7 SP1 doesn't like the way the boot sequence is executed if I boot through an external boot loader such as GRUB.

Now I don't know if

• it's because GRUB is on a different hard disk
• or just because GRUB handles the boot sequence differently from how Windows 7 does.

_ EDIT ___________________________________________________________

Doing some research I found this blog entry:
Windows 7/2008 R2 Service Pack 1 fails with 0x800f0a12 - Ramblings of a Support Engineer - Site Home - TechNet Blogs

I find among the comments some advice about moving the "boot" flag from the GRUB partition to the Windows 7 one (e.g. with gparted).
This could probably be done in the case you have GRUB on the same HD you have Windows 7 on, and may solve the problem.

In my case, having a "boot" flag for any HD (Disk 1 had the "boot" flag set to the Windows 7 partition, Disk 2 had it set to GRUB) the only thing I had to do was instruct the system to boot once off Disk 1 before Disk 2.
But I'm confident that moving the "boot" flag with gparted would solve it also for people that have GRUB and Windows 7 on the same disk. They should just remember to put it back where it belongs once finished installing SP1

I tried installing SP1 via Windows Update and by downloading the file, but each time I got the same error message (0x800f0a12). While searching through another Windows 7 forum I found a solution that worked for me. I also dual boot between Windows 7 and OpenSuse 11.3 using Grub, and what I did was go into Control Panel, Administrative Tools, Computer Mgmt, and then Disk Mgmt. Right click on your C partition and Mark that partition as Active. Close control panel and all other programs, and then reinstall SP1. I used the downloaded file, right clicked on the file and Run as Administrator which finally installed SP1. Hope this works for you.
Joe