Installing Windows 10 RSAT Tools on EN-GB Media-Installed Systems

Posted by Rik Hepworth on Friday, November 13, 2015

This post is an aide memoir so I don’t have to suffer the same annoyance and frustration at what should be an easy task.

I’ve now switched to my Surface Pro 3 as my only system, thanks to the lovely new Pro 4 Type Cover and Surface Dock. That meant that I needed the Remote Server Administration Tools installing. Doing that turned out to be much more of an odyssey that it should have been and I’m writing this in the hope that it will allow others to quickly find the information I struggled to.

The RSAT tools download is, as before, a Windows Update that adds the necessary Windows Features to your installation. The trouble is, that download is EN-US only (really, Microsoft?!). If, like me, you used the EN-GB media to install you’re in a pickle.

Running the installed appears to work – it proceeds with no errors, albeit rather quickly – but the RSAT features were unavailable. I already had a US keyboard on my config (my pro keyboard is US), but that was obviously not enough. I added the US language, but still couldn’t get the installer to work.

I got more information on the problem by following the steps described in a TechNet article on using DISM to install Windows Updates. That led me to a pair of articles on the SysadminTips site about the installation problem, and how to fully add the US language pack to solve it.

It turns out that the EN-GB media doesn’t install the full US-EN language pack files, so when you add the US language it doesn’t add enough stuff into the OS to allow the RSAT tools. Frankly, that’s a mess and I hope Microsoft deal with the issue by releasing multi-language RSAT tools.