Can't install any games I had installed on a previous Windows installation

Nopenoneinnope · Jul 25, 2021

OK. So: This weekend I uninstalled windows due to some issues and reinstalled the whole thing from scratch. All went fine until I reinstalled the XBox app and a few of the games I had on the go.

Most of my games prior to the reinstall were installed to a secondary drive (let's call it D. This drive remained in the system, moved over to E: (I later had to format it because I had no way to delete the windows app UWP directory, which may have to do with this problem), but when I tried to reinstall the games I tried to install them to a different, blank drive (the new D

After the windows reinstallation, I installed a couple of games I had never tried before, and they install and run fine. However, when I try to reinstall a game I had on the system prior to the windows reinstallation, I get this error:

https://support.xbox.com/en-GB/help/errors/error-code-0x80073cf3

I'm not going to go into just how inane that "technical" article is. I've restarted, waited, retried, reinstalled the xbox windows components, tried installing the games through the store... nothing. I've also tried to get support to call me but there's a "Problem on my end" The error mentions it's because there's a prior installation in the system. So my question is:

How can I erase the traces of the old installation from my (should-be) shiny new Windows installation? Especially when these games were never installed in this new Windows install? And a follow-up, how could there be any traces of them if I reinstalled windows from scratch?

I love the gamepass service... on the xbox. The xbox app PC implementation and UWP are probably the worst pile of steaming garbage I've ever seen Windows put out. It's been nothing but problems ever since I've been using them. It's just staggeringly bad, not fit for purpose stuff.

:)

Nopenoneinnope

Hi Tezzarrific

That''s fine, I have no issues reinstalling the games. The drive I was trying to install them to was clean (newly formatted) - the old installations where in a separate external disk with the rest of my backups.

Nopenoneinnope

Hello

Thanks for the reply and sorry, that wasn't clear - I installed it fresh from a newly downloaded/created USB. I nuked all partitions on the system drive as well, so no chance of any files left behind.

However, I did have a Microsoft Apps folder left over on one of the secondary drives (the original D: mentioned above. I can't see how windows would even know about it, but...

I'm now formatting both secondary drives (I found no way to delete the old windows apps folders, even after taking ownership and changing permissions... just got nested "this file does not exist any more" errors though I could clearly the files sitting there on the folder. I *hate* UWP.

Once everything is clean, I'll reinstall Windows from USB again and see what happens...

Cheers

Farscape247

as you have re installed windows it breaks the encryption on the game folder that gamepass and windows store uses, you have to re download the lot, unlike steam and all the other clients microsoft chose this way.

if you are trying to install the games to another drive there will be remnants on that drive of the old game installs including the encrypted folder. this all has to be removed as the new windows install will refuse to use those older folders.

Nopenoneinnope

Hi Mateus

Before reinstalling the whole OS, I thought I'd give your solution 1 a go. Didn't had much faith in it as I had already reinstalled the xbox and some other components via powershell... but it did the trick! I guess it re-registers every installed app, rather than do anything with the windows components? Anyow, thanks so much - you just saved me a load of time and pain.

Regards

MateusFontana

Hello, how are you? My name is Mateus. I'm an Independent Advisor and I'll be glad to help you today.

First I'm sorry you're having this problem. I saw that you have already tried some solutions, and also the Microsoft solution.

Solution 1:

Go to Search, type PowerShell, right-click Powershell, open as administrator

Enter the following command, and press Enter: Get-AppXPackage | Foreach {Add-AppxPackage -DisableDevelopmentMode -Register “$($_.InstallLocation)\AppXManifest.xml”}

Restart your computer

This solution you can find in the link below.

https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/xbox/forum/...

Solution 2:

Download the Create Windows 10 installation media application from the link below, at the end of the download run the application, and then follow the instructions given by the program at the end click on upgrade. Rest assured none of your files will be lost, this is a system restore that will try to fix this error.

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/software-downlo...

Can't install any games I had installed on a previous Windows installation