6 brutal hours working with three different MS techs on a paid incident and the update problem solved. In my case it was a driver, maybe for my NVe ssd drive, that update couldn't find. A manual update was also done but probably not needed. Installing that was not trivial.
There are update logs that have to be searched for errors.
Thank you for your time on call today. Please see below the troubleshooting steps used to resolve the issue -
From Setupapi.dev.log -
[Boot Session: 2021/04/28 18:35:16.500]
>>> [Install Driver Updates]
>>> Section start 2021/04/28 18:35:28.411
cmd: C:\WINDOWS\winsxs\amd64_microsoft-windows-servicingstack_31bf3856ad364e35_10.0.19041.963_none_e7400f2b262ca554\TiWorker.exe -Embedding
sto: Image State = Specialized
sto: Image Architecture = amd64
sto: Image OS Version = 10.0.19043
sto: Image Product Type = WinNT
sto: Transaction = CbsDriversAndPrimitives
sto: Driver Updates = 655
! inf: Unable to load INF: 'C:\WINDOWS\System32\DriverStore\FileRepository\nvraid.inf_amd64_144351277838b429\nvraid.inf'(00000003)
! inf: Error 3: The system cannot find the path specified.
!!! inf: Invalid INF 'C:\WINDOWS\System32\DriverStore\FileRepository\nvraid.inf_amd64_144351277838b429\nvraid.inf', parsing error on line 0. Code = 1002
!!! sto: Failed to get version info for driver update 'C:\WINDOWS\System32\DriverStore\FileRepository\nvraid.inf_amd64_144351277838b429\nvraid.inf'. Error = 0x00000003
<<< Section end 2021/04/28 18:35:29.600
<<< [Exit status: FAILURE(0x00000003)]
The Driver file was not present at the location -
The registry was also missing for nvraid.inf
Steps performed to mitigate the issue:
As we see issue is caused by nvraid.inf, we omitted the driver operation upon reboot by deleting its entry under below registry path:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Component Based Servicing\DriverOperations
Note: You need take the permission of the registry key and locate the entries for driver ntprint, delete them before restart.
Post removing the nvraid.inf registry entry update got installed successfully.