Group Policy Fails on Import in GPMC
I was working an issue where I couldn’t import Group Policy’s settings to a new policy from one environment to another using GPMC. The error message I got was the following:
GPO: Test GPO V1.0...Failed
The overall error was: The system cannot find the file specified.
Additional details follow.
[Error] The task cannot be completed. There was an error with extension [Registry]. The file [\\domain_name\sysvol\domain_name\Policies\{AAAAAAA-BBBB-CCCC-DDDD-EEEEEEEEEEEE}\Adm\admfiles.ini] cannot be accessed.
The following error occurred:
The system cannot find the file specified.
I got the policy from in a zipped format and all seemed well when I unzipped it. The first thing I did was try to copy the admfiles.ini from another policy into the new policy I was trying to import the settings to. That didn’t work. I then took a closer look into the policy that was unzipped. I noticed after digging further into the guts of this policy that it was in fact missing not only this file but also GptTmpl.inf and install.ins. The culprit was Outlook blocking certain types of files due to a security configuration.
To resolve this I had to password protect the zip file to ensure those three files came through. Once I tried to import the settings with all the files there…it worked! Imagine that.