Solved Yet another Sandbox failure

Jabiru said:

Hello,

I have just cloned my C: drive (Win 11 23H2/22631.3007) using Acronis for WD and now on the cloned drive I can't get Windows Sandbox to initialize. At first it gave me a wierd error and research indicated if I deleted the VHDX files in the container folder the system would recreate the virtual drive. I did that but now it refuses to initialize. I have tried everything I can find to fix this including unchecking/restarting, and checking/restarting anything virtual in the programs & features. I've compared the files structure on the old drive and the new drive and they are identical.

Anyone have a fix I haven't already tried for this?

View attachment 84120

Jabiru

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Jabiru said:

Yes, I have uninstalled and reinstalled Sandbox rebooting after the uninstall. and again after the reinstall.

C: drive is a WD Black 1TB with 529GB available.

I'm assuming that's because the initialization process creates them and that's failing for some reason.

Click to expand...

@echo off

echo Checking for permissions
>nul 2>&1 "%SYSTEMROOT%\system32\cacls.exe" "%SYSTEMROOT%\system32\config\system"

echo Permission check result: %errorlevel%

REM --> If error flag set, we do not have admin.
if '%errorlevel%' NEQ '0' (
echo Requesting administrative privileges...
goto UACPrompt
) else ( goto gotAdmin )

:UACPrompt
echo Set UAC = CreateObject^("Shell.Application"^) > "%temp%\getadmin.vbs"
echo UAC.ShellExecute "%~s0", "", "", "runas", 1 >> "%temp%\getadmin.vbs"

echo Running created temporary "%temp%\getadmin.vbs"
timeout /T 2
"%temp%\getadmin.vbs"
exit /B

:gotAdmin
if exist "%temp%\getadmin.vbs" ( del "%temp%\getadmin.vbs" )
pushd "%CD%"
CD /D "%~dp0"

echo Batch was successfully started with admin privileges
echo .
cls
GOTO:menu
:menu
Title Sandbox Installer

echo --------------------------------------------------
echo What do you want to do?
echo 1 Install
echo 2 Uninstall
echo 3 Exit
set /p uni= Select 1/2/3 :
if %uni% ==1 goto :in
if %uni% ==2 goto :un
if %uni% ==3 goto :ex

:in
cls
Title Install Sandbox

pushd "%~dp0"

dir /b %SystemRoot%\servicing\Packages\*Containers*.mum >sandbox.txt

for /f %%i in ('findstr /i . sandbox.txt 2^>nul') do dism /online /norestart /add-package:"%SystemRoot%\servicing\Packages\%%i"

del sandbox.txt

Dism /online /enable-feature /featurename:Containers-DisposableClientVM /LimitAccess /ALL /NoRestart

goto :remenu

:un
cls
Title Uninstall Sandbox

pushd "%~dp0"

Dism /online /disable-feature /featurename:Containers-DisposableClientVM /NoRestart

dir /b %SystemRoot%\servicing\Packages\*Containers*.mum >sandbox.txt

for /f %%i in ('findstr /i . sandbox.txt 2^>nul') do dism /online /norestart /remove-package:"%SystemRoot%\servicing\Packages\%%i"

del sandbox.txt

goto :remenu

:remenu
cls
echo Do you want to restart now?
echo 1 Yes
echo 2 No
set /p uni= Type in Option :
if %uni% ==1 goto :re
if %uni% ==2 goto :ex

:re
shutdown /r /t 0 /f
goto :ex

:ex
exit

Jabiru said:

I managed to find another sandbox installer script and ran it. The uninstaller seemed to work fine, but the installer had all kinds of errors when I ran it. The errors seemed to center around not being able to open certain packages. Needless to say sandbox still won't work. Now I get the following error:
I've attached the script. Is there an install log for this? Maybe the errors could shed some light on what went wrong.
View attachment 84317

Click to expand...

DISM /Online /Cleanup-Image /CheckHealth

(Would liked to have a log available to check for sure).

Click to expand...

c:
cd\
cd c:\{mydirwhenthescriptresides}
sandbox.bat >output.txt

Jabiru said:

Update.....

Yesterday I performed a "Windows Repair Install" which under the circumstances went pretty well. It apparently over-wrote core system files and solved the Sandbox problem. Sandbox now works again on my main baseline. There are some interesting "quirks" as a result of the effort. Somehow the "repair" dropped the AMD Radeon Adrenalin video driver instead of the PRO edition. In the past I've had some problems with that driver so I had to reinstall the correct video driver. In addition, I discovered that my Firefox no longer performed downloads, I'd get a "failure". A quick reinstall fixed that one too. Undoubtedly I will discover other (hopefully) minor problems which I can fix.

Now for some speculation on what may have caused the original problem.....

I'm told that certain windows apps (Sandbox may be one of them) have registry paths using the \Device identifier scheme. You may have seen this in antivirus notifications like Windows Defender, when it forbids changes to some files on your system. These references take the form of \Device\HarddiskVolume3 or sometimes just \Harddisk\0. These identifiers may also include more device embedded addresses but I haven't checked on that yet. This might explain changing the C: drive SSD, having a different "hard" address, which could cause the system to not find the correct location of the necessary files to execute the app. (It's just an idea).

I ran acoss this which provides some background: https://www.windowsdigitals.com/device-hard-disk-volume-3-4-5-windows/

At any rate, it looks like it's fixed.

Jabiru

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