I recently ran into a problem where I needed to uninstall WSUS and start over again. While attempting to uninstall WSUS I received a notice that the uninstall did not complete successfully, and a check of the event logs revealed the rather cryptic error 1603.
A bit of Googling turned up the following post: http://davidvielmetter.com/tricks/wsus-wont-uninstall-or-re-install/ by David Vielmetter.
The long and short of it is to open RegEdit, go to HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Update Services\Server\Setup and ensure that the two keys wYukonInstalled and SqlInstanceIsRemote are both set to zero.
After that you should be good to go, and the uninstall should complete successfully.
Actually this is but only one of several possible issues that could impact uninstalling and reinstalling WSUS. This particular issue only occurs where the WSUS database had been migrated from the Windows Internal Database to a SQL Server, and the wYukonInstalled value never got set from '1' to '0' during the migration.
ReplyDeleteA comprehensive post describing ALL of the steps that need to be performed to completely uninstall a broken WSUS installation can be found in the Microsoft TechNet WSUS Forum in the post How to Uninstall WSUS. (http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/winserverwsus/thread/f447e7d6-7007-4eb6-b38b-90f92525e092)
Note: A *healthy* WSUS server can simply have the roles removed via Server Manager.