Error: Failed to install Active Directory Domain Services binaries

Posted on July 26th, 2010.

I was adding an additional domain controller (Win 2008 R2) to the domain in our CRM Hosted environment this weekend, and I ran into this error when installing the AD Domain Services role:

Active Directory Domain Services Installer : Failed to install Active Directory Domain Services binaries.

Completely useless error message and the log file in \Windows\Debug didn’t have anything further.

I started scrolling through the System Event Log hoping for clues. Since it was a brand new server the log was pretty clean with one exception:

Source:	Service Control Manager
Event ID:	7001
Level:	Error
Description:	The DFS Namespace service depends on the Remote Registry service which failed to start because of the following error: The service cannot be started, either because it is disabled or because it has no enabled devices associated with it.

Out of other ideas, I decided to clean this one up. The Remote Registry Service had, indeed, been disabled by our data center providers when they imaged the operating system. So I enabled the Remote Registry Service and rebooted. This time, no DFS error in the event log. Fingers crossed, I tried the ADDS Role installation again, and it worked.

So ADDS must have some dependency on DFS, but it would have been nice if the error that was raised was a bit more helpful.

Hope this helps someone else.

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