CU Fails: Unable to remove product. Error code is 2330

I was helping a friend recently update his Exchange servers. When we launched the cumulative update we ran into this error.

Unable to remove product with code 4934d1ea-be46-48b1-8847-f1af20e892c1. Fatal error during installation. Error code is 1603. Last error reported by the MSI package is 'The installer has encountered an unexpected error installing this package. This may indicate a problem with this package. The error code is 2330.'

According to this reference guide from DesktopEngineer.com Error Code 2330 translates to ‘Error getting file attributes’.

Ruh-roh! That sounds like file corruption.

When exploring the Application Log we discovered a number of 10005 MSIINSTALLER errors.

Product: Microsoft Exchange Server -- The installer has encountered an unexpected error installing this package. This may indicate a problem with this package. The error code is 2330. The arguments are: 1392, E:\Program Files\Microsoft\Exchange Server\V15\ClientAccess\Owa\prem\15.0.913.22\resources\themes\base\images\0

When we attempted to navigate to this folder we were unable to list its contents. We were, however, able to rename the parent folder. Rerunning the Cumulative Update failed again with the same error. This time Event Viewer indicated a new folder.

Ultimately, the fix was running CHKDSK /R against the volume where Exchange was installed. Once we did this we were able to successfully upgrade to Cumulative Update 8.

Not finished yet

If you do run into this problem (and hopefully this fixes it) there is still one important question to ask; what caused your corruption in the first place?

For us, it was an issue with the virtual environment. But any time you encounter any kind of corruption it’s always best to perform a root cause analysis. Check your logs. Use the tools from your hardware vendor. Be sure to find the cause before it becomes a much bigger problem — like data loss.

How about you? Have you experienced error 1603 or 2330? What did you do to fix it? Drop a comment below.