Second Tuesday of every month called Microsoft patch Day 
Patches get released and configmgr* guys busy in testing ,moving them to production.
As usual, I have Downloaded the patches,added to the package,deployed to Distribution Points ,all returned success (Decompressed the PCK successfully).Until here Good.
While testing the patches on one of the server,it just stands at downloading /Preparing for installation for quite long but nothing happens.Huh ? (login with mstsc /admin)
ok,start with basic troubleshooting by looking at contentTransfermanager.log and datatransferservice.log because these two logs plays the role whether the client attempts to download content or not
ContentTransferManager.log–> logs when client attempts to download content from the first distribution point listed in the content location.
DataTransferService.log —>Logs if a job has been created to download the files to the client or not.
Here is what i have from the logs:
Datatransferservice.log:
Error sending DAV request. HTTP code 404, status ‘Resource Not Found’ ,
GetDirectoryList_HTTP(‘http://servername:8530/SMS_DP_SMSPKGH$/packageID/14eb1517-9a6f-461d-9dd6-656d876efbe4′) failed with code 0x8004027e.
Contenttransfermanager.log
Error sending HEAD request. HTTP code 500, status ‘Internal Server Error’
From the above logs,we know ,client is having issues while getting the required patch content from the Distribution Point.Client keeps trying for longer period but nothing happens.
take a look at IIS logs if it gives any further clues.
On windows server 2003,Logs located at C:\WINDOWS\system32\LogFiles\W3SVC1
2013-10-10 00:02:25 W3SVC1 10.83.1.14 HEAD /SMS_DP_SMSPKGH$/PackageID/14eb1517-9a6f-461d-9dd6-656d876efbe4 – 8530 – 10.83.1.14 SMS+CCM 401 1 0
From the above snippet,you can see an error code 401 which is access denied.
I then looked at the Update ID if it really exist in the package folder or not ? Browse H:\smspkgh$\packageID for content 14eb1517-9a6f-461d-9dd6-656d876efbe4 .
I can not find it though my package is successfully decompressed and sent the status message to central site.
I compared the patch package properties with working server properties,i see there are 100+ files missing.
something interesting to know ? why did this happened ? have no time now to troubleshoot why did this happened may be later but for now ,try to fix Preparing for Installation .
Solution that worked for me:
I don’t know if there is hash value for each update that is created and downloaded by Configmgr but i gave a try to copy the missing Update IDs manually from working server to Issue DP.
Close the Configmgr software update applet (if you just close it it will be running in the background),to kill it,go to task manager,you see process called smscliui.exe ,end the process
Restart the SMS agent host service
open configuration manager applet from control panel,initiate software update deployment evaluation cycle and software update scan cycle ,few min later you will see prompt asking to install the Windows updates if the deadline is not reached.
This time,all the required patches installed successfully
To confirm , if this solution works for all,logged into other server where in,it require different patches which are not available in DP,do a manual copy of the missing patches (which you can get from the contentransfermanager.log) from working server
Restart the SMS agent host,end the sccm client user interface,initiate the software update actions,it DID .
To avoid this issue on other clients,get the missing patch content from working server .
Hope you find this article useful.
SCCM Configmgr 2007:Software Updates Stuck at Preparing for Installation Error sending DAV request. HTTP code 404, status ‘Resource Not Found’ is a post from: Eswar Koneti's Blog