Windows Update errors 0x80010108 and 0x80070001.
The increasing complexity of computers and, even more, the operating systems running on them, often leads to a behavior that's all but not what you did expect, and it rather often arrives that you get some error situation, that you can't explain. Such error situations are not uncommon with Windows Update, as shows my article Windows Update unavailable: Nothing but a blank page! On this page, I describe two further problems, that I encountered with Windows Update, and how I finally succeeded to get rid of the error conditions. To note, that the article is not an answer to why this happened, nor gives it a solution, that always solves the problem. Just the description of what I did and what you can try, and that possibly works for you, as it worked for me.
I got error 0x80010108 on Windows 8.1, when after a fresh install of the OS, I launched Windows Update. I tried several times, nothing to do, the installation of the updates started, but always ended with this error condition. The screenshot shows the update failure on a French version of Windows 8.1.
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No idea to what the error is due. I finally succeeded to install the updates, by doing the installation by selecting 10 to 20 updates at a time, instead of trying to install the whole at once. What updates, you choose to install first, seems not to matter. Maybe, however, that you should let the big cumulative quality update 2022 for the end, when all other updates have been done...
I got error 0x80070001 on Windows 10, for a very special reason, in relationship with my virtualization software, so, if you are a mainstream user, you will probably never get this error, at least not for the reason described here.
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As lots of my virtual machines run old or very old operating systems, I work a lot with floppy diskettes and installing a virtual floppy drive was more than convenient for me. Not easy to find one for Windows 10, because drivers for Windows 64bit have to be digitally signed and that isn't the case for most of the virtual floppy drive emulators available. I finally found ImDisk, that allows to mount floppy, CD/DVD and harddisk images. Mounting a floppy diskette image creates a virtual floppy drive, that, because I use it a lot, starts with Windows on my system, and thus is permanently mounted. Searching the Internet in order to find a solution to my 0x80070001 error, I found a page, created several years ago, where this error is reported on I don't remember what version of Windows. And, this page also gives the reason for this error (without explaining how this can be possible): Windows Update does not work on a system with an ImDisk floppy drive. Unmounting the diskette image (what removes the floppy drive) and Windows does its updates without any problems. Computer science magic!
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