If your reading this you’re probably at the point of trying to install a new WSUS server on Windows Server 2012 R2 and have received the message “Fatal Error: Illegal characters in path”.

The fix is annoyingly simple.

You may have created a partition specifically for the task, i.e. created a new drive and assigned it the letter E:\, and only referenced the root of the partition assuming the installation would create whatever directories it needs, you know like every other software.

The problem is you cannot specify the root of partition alone, you need to specify a directory, or the partition name, such as E:\WSUS.

A fully qualified path should fix the problem.

What is WSUS?

Windows Server Update Services (WSUS) provides a cost-effective patch management solution to deploy updates to domain-joined Windows servers and workstation in a corporate network. WSUS is fully integrated in Windows Server 2012 and can be enabled on Windows clients by configuring settings in Group Policy Objects – GPO.