Unable to install .net 3.5 on Server 2016 VM

Question

I am trying to install .net 3.5 on my Azure VM. Every time I try I get a failure due to the OS not being able to find the sources. I have tried pointing it at c:\windows\winsxs without any luck. I also do not have the ISO used to provision the environment, so I cannot get the sources from there either.

Answer 1

Is this a brand new VM or one that you have had for a while?

I ask because I spun up a new 2016 machine to see if I could repro the issue but it looks like .NET 3.5 installed without issue: 

This leads me to believe that something might have happened during the provisioning of this VM that caused the dependencies to be missing. 

Couple of things you could try: 

1) If this is a brand new VM try simply spinning up a new one and installing .Net 3.5. If it succeeds just use that machine

2) You could create a second 2016 machine and attempt to copy the dependencies from that new machine over to your old machine

3) Download the .ISO for Windows Server 2016, Mount the .ISO as a drive and copy the /source/sxs folder to where you need it. 

-Micah

Answer 2

So the VMs were created earlier that day. I just created a new VM and it was able to install 3.5. However there are other issues that prevent me from swapping VMs. We were finally able to get a 2016 ISO and will just use that for the sources