Monday, December 7, 2020

Uninstalling old Windows Assessment and Deployment Kit versions

I recently went to use the Compatibility Administrator from the Windows Assessment and Deployment Kit, but was blocked by the Program Compatibility Assistant telling me it doesn't support my version of Windows. Indeed, I had installed it a long time ago on a previous build of Windows 10, 10586. So I downloaded the new ADK installer, but it refused to install unless I removed the old version first. That's reasonable, so I tried to uninstall the 10586 version from the Apps settings page, but it failed with "setup cannot locate WimMountAdkSetupAmd64.exe" and prompted me to "locate content." This is probably related to build 10586 no longer being supported and the relevant ADK downloads being removed from Microsoft's web site. I found a couple copies of that file laying around the disk, but when I selected them, the process failed at 33% with "unable to verify the integrity of downloaded content." Trying a "repair" installation, even with a newly downloaded copy of the old version's installer, failed with the same errors.

I could, however, use the "change" setup feature to remove all ADK components except Deployment Tools. Going back to a WimMountAdkSetupAmd64.exe file I found (Explorer search does a fine job of locating a copy under C:\ProgramData\Package Cache), I ran it from an administrative command prompt with the /uninstall switch. That completed without incident, after which using "change" in the ADK setup to remove the Deployment Tools component worked! Since that was the last component, the ADK vanished from the apps list and I could successfully install the new version.

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