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Forum Discussion

folder's avatar
folder
Explorer | Level 4
8 months ago
Solved

"Installation failed. The Dropbox installation failed to start" error on Windows 11

Dropbox has worked fine for many years on my Lenovo Thinkpad X1, then suddenly stopped working. The link on the start menu became inactive. Starting Dropbox from dropbox.exe directly said the install...
desktop
Error Messages
windows
  • MasterHD's avatar
    MasterHD
    5 months ago

    I had the same error:

    Installation failed. The Dropbox installation failed to start.

    I also could not run Dropbox nor uninstall it!
    I asked ChatGPT to troubleshoot with me. After spending an hour cleaning registries, folders, repairing, safe-mode, etc. I then tried running the standalone installer from the command prompt with a flag to try and view log output. I started my command prompt and navigated to the location of my installer exe, then ran:

    "Dropbox 228.4.5567 Offline Installer.x64.exe" /log DropboxInstallLog.txt

    This failed even sooner but at least produced an error code 0x80040c01.

    ChatGPT realized this may be an issue with Google Update components. It suggested doing a silent install with the /S flag:

    "Dropbox 228.4.5567 Offline Installer.x64.exe" /S

    And this worked immediately!

MasterHD's avatar
MasterHD
New member | Level 2
5 months ago

I had the same error:

Installation failed. The Dropbox installation failed to start.

I also could not run Dropbox nor uninstall it!
I asked ChatGPT to troubleshoot with me. After spending an hour cleaning registries, folders, repairing, safe-mode, etc. I then tried running the standalone installer from the command prompt with a flag to try and view log output. I started my command prompt and navigated to the location of my installer exe, then ran:

"Dropbox 228.4.5567 Offline Installer.x64.exe" /log DropboxInstallLog.txt

This failed even sooner but at least produced an error code 0x80040c01.

ChatGPT realized this may be an issue with Google Update components. It suggested doing a silent install with the /S flag:

"Dropbox 228.4.5567 Offline Installer.x64.exe" /S

And this worked immediately!

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