Exchange 2010 Update Rollup failed – error 1603

If you’ve never seen this error code before when installing Update Rollups for Exchange 2010, then you haven’t lived. There’s plenty of blogs and articles out there about it, but I wanted to record it for my own purposes so I don’t go trawling for the answer next time!

In a nutshell, the reason this happens is that UAC hates you.

Simple fix to this is to run CMD as Administrator, and use msiexec to install the Update Rollup, like this:

msiexec /update Exchange2010-KB2961522-x64-en.msp

Gotchas? Well the file should be on a local drive (not a network share). If you are still having problems after this, take a gander at the following KB article: http://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/2784788/en-us

That’s about it. Happy Update Rollup’ing!