Windows 8.1 installation error 0x80004005

I have a laptop with a single hard drive.  What worked for me was a reinstall after completely wiping the old installation.  The problem I had, for whatever reason, was in the master boot record which somehow got messed up when I dual booted with Ubuntu.  By doing a complete reinstall (without retaining settings and programs) the MBR was rebuilt in the expected place and the upgrade to 8.1 went without problem.  I don't know if this will work for you but it may be worth a try. 

Sadly Microsoft seem unable to respond to this in a timely fashion.

Paul

Congrats to all who have overcome this problem. I'd really appreciate advice, esp from Microsoft, on what to do about my version of the problem, which I know others have (or have had) too. In summary, I'm upgrading from W8 to W8.1 via the Store, everything goes ok till after the 1st restart and then apparently setting up (of W8.1) is ok till it reaches 68 percent, then the computer restarts and begins 'restoring your prev version of windows'. When W8 is restored it explains it couldn't complete the upgrade, with error 0x800040005 0x20004. There is also a reported disk fault (according to Action Center), which has to get scanned and repaired: the drive has a long string of characters including fecd7546-d106-11e1-96fa-8086.... The PC previously had W7, was upgraded to W8 and in the last few days I've reinstalled W8 from the installation DVD (keeping my settings and programs etc) and carried out all updates before attempting the latest upgrade to W8.1. I don't have expertise to try out many of the ideas in this string: surely this is a generic fault for which a solution is being prepared (or acknowledged by Microsoft as being needed). Somebody please advise what I should do. I'd really appreciate it.

Best wishes

John

OK, bit the Bullit!

Managed to get 8.0 to install on another "old" drive, fiddled the Key as per suggestion elsewhere and then installed 8.1 and changed the key to my valid 8.0 key.

Of course my PC is now back at square one and it is possibly a good time to re-install all the apps I really use and get rid of the legacy that accumelated since I built this "Super PC" in 2009/04.

Still knocks the socks off the "High-end" units we get at work! (i7-2600 3.4GHz 4HB HP 8200 Elite's)

Good Luck to all the others still struggling - there does not seem to be an easy way on some systems!

Thanks for your contributions - Learnt a lot - You never learn anything if whatever you are busy with works 1st shot!

It is the boot.  As I noted previously with my dual boot windows 8 Ubuntu I had somehow deleted the mbr sector of the drive.  It still booted  fine but 8.1 didn't like the configuration of no separate windows mbr. 

What worked for me was deleting the windows 8 partition and  a reinstall of windows 8 into the unallocated space .  It automatically recreated the MBR.  The download and install of 8.1 went easily after that.

No Luck!

I see this about .dll fixes - will try that this evening - Can't get into my system remotely anymore!  :(

http://news.softpedia.com/news/Windows-8-1-Installation-Error-0x80004005-Workarounds-396667.shtml

Basically, the easiest way to fix this problem is to perform a clean install. Make sure you back up all your data, **download the Windows 8.1 ISO** and install the new operating system on an empty partition.

If you’re still planning to determine the cause of the issue, Dell’s support team is pointing users to an official Microsoft advisory claiming that the error occurs if “dynamic-link library files (.dll files) are not registered correctly or if there is a firewall between the computer and the Internet that does not allow HTTPS (SSL) connections.”

To fix this, launch a command prompt window with administrator privileges and run the following commands, one by one:

regsvr32 Softpub.dll

regsvr32 Wintrust.dll

regsvr32 Initpki.dll

Reboot your computer and try to install Windows 8.1 once again.

Of course, make sure you drop us a line in the comment box below if one of these workarounds solved the issues for you or in case you’ve found a new way to deal with the error.

??