As you may know, Steven Hosking and I recently started a YouTube channel called Intune.Training where we are walking through how to get started with Microsoft Intune each week. As we were recording our latest episode (coming soon) on Win32 applications, the demo failed when we attempted to install the application we had just built in Intune. We didn’t have time in the video to go through troubleshooting the issue, but I later determined the issue. I’d like to cover the troubleshooting steps that I used to resolve the issue. We hope to cover troubleshooting in more detail in a future video.
This post is a supplement to the video, so if you haven’t watched it yet, you may want to start here.
Win32 App Installation Failure
In the video downloaded and extracted Microsoft Mathematics then packaged it up as a Win32 Intune app.
When Steve entered the command line in Intune, he entered msiexec /i "MSMath_x64.msi" /q as the install commandline. Whenever we attempted to install from the company portal, we got this less-than-helpful error message:
0070643 - Fatal error during installation
Whenever I went back to the Intune portal, I navigated to Device install status Home > Microsoft Intune > Client apps - Apps > Microsoft Maths > Device install status
Once there, I was able to see the error for the device we were attempting to install on. It was listed as 0x80070643 - Fatal error during installation.
A quick internet search led me to a Tech Community post where I found this helpful message:
**0x80070643 **- Fatal error during installation This generic error is specific to MSI app installations via MDM. It translates to a generic MSI 1603 error and does not contain any further information to help troubleshoot. 1603 errors are common in the packaging community and may be caused by many factors. Next Steps: Visit this link to understand more about the 1603 error. https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/Intune-Customer-Success/Error-Codes-For-Troubleshooting-App-Installation-Issues/ba-p/280113
I also found another troubleshooting document for Intune though the log collection steps listed didn’t seem to be an option for me.
https://docs.microsoft.com/intune/troubleshoot-app-install#app-troubleshooting-details
Windows Installer Error
After seeing that the error translated to a 1603, I just did some basic debugging like I would for any other application I would package for SCCM deployment. I discovered that this particular app uses an EXE as the base installer. Steve and I were attempting to launch the MSI directly but it was failing. I searched the internet once again for the app command line options and came up with this command line which tells the MSI that setup was used to launch the MSI. I updated the command line for the app in Intune and tried the install again from the company portal and it installed right away.
msiexec /i "MSMath_x64.msi" /qn FROMSETUP=1 ALREADYRUNNING=0 DOTNET35=1 SXSOFF=0
Summary
That was a long way to say, test your app installs before you go through the trouble of loading them into Intune. As you can see, Steve and I like to live on the edge with our videos and show you how even the simplest things can fail. Stay tuned for more blunders and fun times with Intune!