Over the past few weeks I have experienced several interesting problems between my two computers. Of particular note was an issue I discovered when the Event Viewer on my Windows 7 Ultimate 32-bit machine failed. After some troubleshooting I decided to attempt SFC /scannow. I got the error message "Windows Resource Protection could not perform the requested operation." This worried me. So I attempted to boot into WinRE from my Win 7 installation disk. The result in WinRE was the same. No good. I scrounged forum after forum looking for an answer, but nothing worked. It seemed like everyone just gave up and reinstalled their OS, but I would not do that. So I kept exploring. CBS.log showed nothing of interest as sfc never made it past "Beginning verification phase of system scan." Finally I found this article: http://www.updatexp.com/scannow-sfc.html which, while interesting and comprehensive, did not directly solve my issue. It did, however, point me to the registry key: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Setup\SourcePath This registry entry does not appear to exist in Win 7, but another entry in it's vicinity caught my attention: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\ProgramFilesDir I had recently moved my program files dir to a different hard drive and placed a junction point in it's place. In the process I had altered HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\ProgramFilesDir to point to "D:\Program Files\", then back to "C:\Program Files\" when the junction point was in place. "C:\Program Files\" is incorrect! the trailing backslash is incorrect, and must be removed! with the ProgramFilesDir value set to "C:\Program Files" I ran sfc /scannow and it scanned properly, finding several corrupt files (some of which required checking cbs.log to repair). I can imagine that some virus maker somewhere will use this to break SFC in the future, but here's your solution! So to review: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\ProgramFilesDir cannot have a trailing backslash! Tell your friends! :) Cheers, Crosmanrond

Hi, Thanks for sharing. We really appreciate your time and efforts. Hope your experience will help other community members facing similar problems.Leo Huang TechNet Community Support

Iv been having a similar problem first noticed a problem with error msgs when trying to run certain installers, tried to do sfc scan got same msg as you after researching it I felt in the same spot as you then I saw your post, unfortunately that did not work for me either there was no \ in ProgramFilesDir value.

I had the same error and was able to get it to run using this command: sfc /scannow /offbootdir=c:\ /offwindir=c:\windows

This article looked promising, but my registry already had the correct entry. =/

I had the same error and was able to get it to run using this command: sfc /scannow /offbootdir=c:\ /offwindir=c:\windows This worked for me - thank you for sharing :0)

this command does not work for me: ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- C:\Windows\system32>sfc /scannow /offbootdir=c:\ /offwindir=c:\windows The arguments passed to sfc are invalid. The offline windows directory specified points to the online system.