Skip to content

STSADM strikes again, Failed to extract the cab file in the solution…

Having more fun with STSADM … I tried doing:

STSADM -o addsolution -filename XmlWebParts.wsp

Help Your SharePoint User

and I received back this message:

Failed to extract the cab file in the solution.

When I looked … I had accidentally duplicated a line in the DDF file so a file was being included in the cab file twice with the same name — apparently SharePoint doesn’t like that.

10 Comments

  1. Unmatched quotes will also cause this.
    For example in your ddf file, if you have:
    “SourceFile” “Destfile”
    but you drop the quote before Destfile, that will do it too.

  2. Thanks for this :)

  3. Thanks :)

  4. This can also occure if the filename in the cab has a special char. To repeat this all you need to do is copy your feature file and past it in the same location resulting in a filename “Copy of FEATURE.xml”. Repeate this process of copyng the original “Feature.xml” file to the same feature folder resulting in a filename “Copy (2) of FEATURE.xml”. Now edit your ddf. Build and attempt to add the solution, voila. No its a different error thrown than the one if you have a special char in the manifest file such as an “&” in the description.

  5. Another reason for this error can be the inclusion of forbidden characters in any files you try to provision through the Module element. I was amazed to discover the humble bracket isn’t allowed ().

  6. Thanks for the post. I had the same error. It was coming from “(” and “)” characters in some file names in the DDF. Renamed the files and the error went away.

  7. Thanks for posting. In my case, my error was also coming from two dots in a file name. I had to rename “btnImage..png” to “btnImage.png”.

  8. single quotemarks in filenames will also give you this error.

  9. Thanks for the post. I have a / instead of \ in a destination dir parameter.

  10. I’m working on a Virtual Machine, without a lot of resources, for example: Disk Space. and this could give you this error too!


Leave a Reply to Leonardo Masi Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

Share this: