I can’t even begin to list all the things I tried because overall it was about 19 hours of me trying every possible fix or idea I could find but here’s a summary of my attempts at installing DE to my PC.
I’d like to start by saying I have a metered connection. Anyway, I had to download the Windows anniversary update twice because the first time it failed at 99%. Then I tried downloading Halo Wars DE through the Halo app and it got to 99% too and gets stuck. I believe the error code it gave was 0x80070005. I tried enabling permissions to several windows apps related folders, and at one point my entire C: drive. Don’t much care if that’s dangerous, I was troubleshooting. None of that worked so I tried Windows support and after a remote session that wasted another GB of data, I was told the only remaining course of action is restart the download. I reluctantly do so, which ended up costing me $30 for a temporary data cap raise. It gets stuck again, flashes the error briefly, then starts over at 0%. At this point I am entirely out of data. Also, now it shows an entirely new error and won’t download at all. I don’t particularly remember what this error code was, but it was short lived.
I gave up for a day, then took my entire system over to a friend’s house to try stuff. I set everything up and try disabling my firewall and giving it another go, but it turns out the outlet was loose and my PC cut out while changing my firewall settings. It rebooted fine, but now the download shows yet another new error code. I found it was mostly related to file system errors, but chkdsk showed 0. Nothing seemed to fix this error either so I gave in and isn’t used the Windows 10 refresh feature to reinstall windows. I got everything back on and tried it again. Yet another new error. 0x80073cf9. I found lots of people had this error with both Forza 3 and GoW 4, so there were lots of topics about it but not one single fix in any forum post or YouTube video made any difference whatsoever.
To go ahead and fast forward to the end, I did some stuff with PowerShell and probably removed and reinstalled the entire windows store twice along with a few other things I don’t remember and just ended up boinking my system in general so I had to reinstall windows a second time. This is where my admittedly great patience and determination has come to a fiery vault and I am entirely at the mercy of finding someone else with similar luck that managed to triumph. Feel free to post any fixes you know of.or can find, and I will tell you more than likely that I’ve already done it and it made no difference. (I hope I’m wrong about that)
An interesting thing I’ve noticed is this error only plagues the Halo games. I tried downloading Halo Wars 2 (you can technically do that) and Halo 5: Forge, both of them give me the 0x80073cf9 error as soon as the download starts. I can’t even get to 10MB. But while I was fretting over things I actually want, the windows store was downloading awful mobile games and apps left and right that I don’t ******* want and even uninstalled before just to have the store be like NOPE and download them again! Whatever is going on, it’s tied to these few large games. It shouldn’t be storage space, I have about 80GB free on my C drive and I’m assuming since the horrible windows store gives no options for a download location, that it defaults to C.