How to Repair WMI

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When Q starts, it talks to the Windows Management Instrumentation service (WMI). This is a core part of Windows that lets third-party programs query information about your computer's hardware. Q uses this as part of its licensing scheme.

WMI is unfortunately quite fragile and may break as a result of:

  • system upgrades
  • running out of hard disk space
  • memory or other hardware problems

Diagnosing WMI Problems

Open a command prompt (see how-to), and enter the following commands, pressing Enter after each one: 

wmic path win32_physicalmemory get capacity

wmic path win32_physicalmedia get serialnumber

wmic nic get MACAddress, PNPDeviceID

You should see results like the following: 

C:\Users\Q>wmic path win32_physicalmemory get capacity
Capacity
4294967296
4294967296

C:\Users\Q>wmic path win32_physicalmedia get serialnumber
SerialNumber
E2AB1Z8O
30026A724406875B
Z1IK30DPKAEZ

C:\Users\Q>wmic nic get MACAddress, PNPDeviceID
MACAddress         PNPDeviceID
                   ROOT\KDNIC\0000
01:00:87:00:F3:18  ROOT\NET\0000
14:BA:E3:11:8B:AE  PCI\VEN_10EC&DEV_8198&SUBSYS_84321943&REV_06\4&1D7623B1&0&00E2

If you see error messages instead, for any of the commands, you need to repair the WMI repository.

Repairing the WMI Repository

The following guide from Microsoft on repairing the WMI repository has been tested by Q support and worked on a Windows 10 machine whose repository was corrupted by memory problems:

http://blogs.technet.com/b/askperf/archive/2009/04/13/wmi-rebuilding-the-wmi-repository.aspx

When Q support followed the guide, we:

  1. Started following the steps in Actions to try:
    1. Followed step a, which re-registered WMI files and services by running a .bat file under a command prompt with Administrator privileges.
    2. Followed step b, by rebooting and running winmgmt /verifyrepository, which verified the repository was correct.
  2. Previously broken wmic commands now worked, and Q was able to start.
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