I once heard a very wise guy saying the notepad is all you need to read log files. I do not say I agree, as I find cmtrace a slightly better tool…. but that’s right until I ran into a ConfigMgr 2012 upgrade to ConfigMgr 1511 earlier today. My upgrade failed, during the file copy phase because it couldn’t copy a new version of cmtrace to my tools folder. Whatever you do, do not click on the View Log button in the installation dialog.

The error in configmgrsetup.log:

ERROR: Failed to copy E:\INSTALLATIONSOURCE\MS\CONFIGMGR1511\DVD\SMSSETUP\tools\CMTrace.exe to k:\program files\microsoft configuration manager\tools\cmtrace.exe, Win32 error = 5

 

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This happened during the file copy phase, which is almost right after the upgrade database phase! I’ll leave it up to you to figure out what that means – not a big problem as we always backup the server before any upgrade!