Very Strange Media Creation Tool Problem

I have a test bench case and have been upgrading some of my old Windows 7 licenses to get Windows 10's digital entitlement on a few motherboard/processor combos I am planning to sell soon. My first few went smoothly. However, on my last combo, I'm running in to an odd issue. It's an Intel DG33TL board with a Quad Core Q8200 on it. I've installed Windows 7 Pro x64 which seemed to have gone through okay, even activated with a legit license key. It was running fine and stable, so I shut it down for the night.

Two nights ago, I decide to boot it up to start the Windows 10 upgrade, and I noticed I was getting certificate errors in IE on every web page I visited, even Google.com. Every file I tried downloading failed, with an error code. I assumed something got corrupted, so I wiped the drive and reinstalled Windows 7. Same issues immediately after the install was complete. I ran the Windows memory diagnostic and that turned up nothing. I ran the SFC and it found no errors. I ran Memtest overnight and found no errors.

So, I figured I'd grab the Media Creation Tool from my flash drive and run that. It failed to run, giving me an error that "There was a problem running this tool" and an error code of 0x80072F8F - 0x2000. I'm seeing a long list of potential causes in my research, but just curious if anyone has come across this. I'm thinking of wiping the drive and installing 10, then activating with the 7 key.

**Forgot to mention no other software has been loaded. Once Windows 7 is installed and activated, I run the MCT.

Try 32-bit Windows 7

I'm not using an .iso at all. I'm using the Media Creation Tool. In fact, it is the same file I've used on dozens of computers already. The Windows 7 install is 64 bit. Same process I've repeated all those times.

Slartybart said:

Try this:
Reset CMOS
Check the BIOS clock - set time correctly

You may be on to something. I noticed during one of the installs, as it finished, that the time zone was correct, but the time was off by 3 hours 30 mins. It was late and I didn't check the BIOS.

DeaconFrost said:

You may be on to something. I noticed during one of the installs, as it finished, that the time zone was correct, but the time was off by 3 hours 30 mins. It was late and I didn't check the BIOS.

That would definitely do it. I was playing Steam games on cruise and had to keep my date set back on my laptop to keep Steam running. When we pulled into port, I was having the same issues described until I changed the laptop to the current local date/time. Then when we left port, I had to lock the computer down to the date/time we left so Steam would keep working. Could not connect my personal laptop to the internet onboard ship.

It was the time and date. I reset the CMOS, then booted in to the BIOS to correct the time. I'm not sure what it was before, but clearing the CMOS set it back to 1/1/2006. With the correct time, I was able to boot back in to Windows 7 without any weird issues, and upgrade to 10. Something to look out for when using older equipment!