Have you ever encountered the “The RPC server is unavailable” error message when trying to start Disk Manager? Have you also noticed that Event Viewer and Disk Defragmenter don’t work either? In fact, if you look at the Services window, you’ll notice that many of Window’s necessary services are not running at all, including the Remote Procedure Call (RPC) Service. Try to start this service and (after a while) you’ll see the “Could not start the Remote Procedure Call (RPC) Service. Error 1058″ error message.

After some Googling, you will have discovered this is caused by the DCOM Server Process Launcher will also failing to start. Many other programs and services require this service because they are DCOM objects, or connect to DCOM objects. You will have also found many other people with the same problem and their solutions (e.g., reboot, Malware scan, sfc /scannow, rollback to restore point, reinstall Windows).

However, if you are like me, none of those solutions solved your Windows’ problem. Here’s what happened to me and how I solved it, and I hope it works for you. (If you are too impatient to read my prose, just skip ahead to the The Solution! section.

The Story

I was installing Windows XP Media Center Edition (with SP2) on a PC with an ASUS motherboard, a DVD-RW and two SATA hard drives. The Windows Setup program was not recognizing the second hard drive despite the drive appearing normally in the BIOS setup menu. After a bit of RTFM, I noticed that the motherboard only supported SATA 1.5Gb, and my two drives (Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 250GB) had 1.5/3.0Gb SATA interfaces. I placed the jumper on each drive, forcing them to use 1.5Gb transfer only. Suddenly, Windows Setup saw the drives was happy–but only for a moment.

The drives were new and unpartitioned. In my experience, Windows Setup seems to dislike unpartitioned drives, so I used Setup to put two partitions on the first drive and one on the second drive. I did a quick NTFS format on the first partition on the first drive, and then indicated that’s where I wanted Windows to be installed. I was surprised to see that Setup had lettered the three partitions F:, G:, and H:, just behind the DVD-RW (E:) and two unknown media devices (C: and D:).

I really didn’t care what the letters of my drive partitions were (I have a Windows 2000 Server that starts with G: and it works just fine), so I continued with the install. The next hint of trouble was during the file copying phase; Setup could not find the file IEXPLORE on the CD–despite the fact it was there. I eventually dismissed the message box without successfully browsing the to file and Setup continued and finished without a complaint. With one reboot and an unusually quick startup later, Windows XP MCE was alive–sort of.

The mysterious drive letter thing started bothering me more than just a little. I decided to pop into Disk Manager and have a go at re-lettering the drives. Well, upon clicking on the Disk Management icon in Computer Management, I was greeted with the “The RPC server is unavailable” error. I tried all of the Google-supplied remedies to fix the problem, but eventually had to conclude that solving the lettering problem would most likely be the correct solution (Windows 2000 would never have this problem!) I had to find out what those two phantom devices assigned to C: and D: were.

The Solution!

Back into the BIOS setup menu, I found that the computer case has an 8-in-1 card reader that is connected to the motherboard as two USB devices and configured as two removable drives. I disabled these devices, booted Windows Setup, re-partitioned and reformatted the drives, and reinstalled Windows XP MCE. The drives letters were now correct in both Windows Setup and Windows XP, and all the services were running and happy. Re-enabling the card reader placed them as removable drives on E: and F: where they should be. For some reason, the DCOM service really didn’t want Windows XP itself to be installed on the F: drive. Go figure.

Now, to keep from spending an entire evening running Microsoft Update and rebooting (over and over and over), I’m just waiting for Microsoft to release (the now late) Windows XP Service Pack 3.

Views: 193 | Tags: troubleshooting, Windows XP

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 30th, 2008 at 9:26 pm and is filed under JDMurray. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.