Windows 7 SDK installation failure

Question

I seem to be completely unable to install the Windows 7 SDK onto my machine, and the only solution I\'ve found on the web is to make a swathe of registry changes. I\'ve done

Answer 1

I installed Visual Studio 2012 and installed Visual Studio 2010 service package 1 and tried installing the SDK again, and it worked. I don't know which of them solved the problem.

Answer 2

All of these (and other) solutions have failed completely for me so I figured out another.

You need the offline installation package (mine was x64), and you need to manually install only the samples. Opening the ISO-file with, for example, 7-Zip from location Setup\WinSDKSamples_amd64 and running WinSDKSamples_amd64.msi did this for me.

Then you just use the normal setup file to REPAIR the installation and choose whatever components you wish.

Answer 3

mgrandi provided a very good resource and answer. I followed similar guidelines and by removing 'leftover' components managed to solve the problem.

As a reference, take a look at Windows SDK for Windows 7 and .NET Framework 4 Release Notes.

This downloads the release notes of the SDK (you should also have it on your computer after trying to install the SDK), and in the section 'Installing and Uninstalling the Windows SDK' you can see that Microsoft recommend cleaning some mess after them.

Answer 4

You should really check the log. It seems that quite a few components can cause the Windows SDK installer to fail to install with this useless error message. For instance it could be the Visual C++ Redistributable Package as mentioned there.

Answer 5

One of the things to also keep in mind is that when you have Visual Studio 2010 SP1 installed some C++ compilers and libraries may have been removed. There's been an update made available by Microsoft to make sure those are brought back to your system.

Install this update to restore the Visual C++ compilers and libraries that may have been removed when Visual Studio 2010 Service Pack 1 (SP1) was installed. The compilers and libraries are part of the Microsoft Windows Software Development Kit for Windows 7 and the .NET Framework 4 (later referred to as the Windows SDK 7.1).

Also, when you read the VS2010 SP1 README you'll also notice that some notes have been made in regards to the Windows 7 SDK (See section 2.2.1) installation. It may be that one of these conditions may apply to you and therefore may need to uncheck the C++ compiler-checkbox as the SDK installer will attempt to install an older version of compilers ÓR you may need to uninstall VS2010 SP1 and re-run the SDK 7.1 installation, repair or modification.

Condition 1: If the Visual C++ Compilers checkbox is selected when the Windows SDK 7.1 is installed, repaired, or modified after Visual Studio 2010 SP1 has been installed, the error may be encountered and some selected components may not be installed.

Workaround: Clear the Visual C++ Compilers checkbox before you run the Windows SDK 7.1 installation, repair, or modification.

Condition 2: If the Visual C++ Compilers checkbox is selected when the Windows SDK 7.1 is installed, repaired, or modified after Visual Studio 2010 has been installed but Visual Studio 2010 SP1 has not been uninstalled, the error may be encountered.

Workaround: Uninstall Visual Studio 2010 SP1 and then rerun the Windows SDK 7.1 installation, repair, or modification.

However, even then I found that I still needed to uninstall any existing Visual C++ 2010 redistributables, as has been suggested by mgrandi.

Answer 6

Uninstalling all C++ redistributables and unchecking the C++ option worked for me. Note that I have VS2010 SP1, and VS2012 installed already.