Fixing “Chrome Installer Failed to Start” Error in Windows

So after uninstalling a former version of the Google Chrome browser, I downloaded the full offline installer of Chrome and tried to install. I have done it many times before successfully, but this time it was different. This time the installation failed and the Chrome installer popped up an error message saying “Installed failed. The Google Chrome installer failed to start”. This is something I had not encountered before and after a quick hand at googling about the problem, I realized that not many other people have faced this problem before either. After numerous attempts to install the Google Chrome browser and removal of the remnants left on my Windows PC, I was finally successful.

Chrome Installer Failed to Start

If you are also facing the “Chrome installed has failed to start” error, then you can follow these steps to clean the remnants of old version of Chrome left behind before installing the new version in your PC:

  1. Press the Win+R key combination on your keyboard to open the Run dialog, type in regedit and press Enter. This will open the Windows Registry Editor.Chrome Installer Failed to Start
  2. In the Registry Editor, locate the following keys related to Google, right-click on them and select Delete.
    • HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\Google
    • HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Google
    • HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Google

    Some of these keys may not exist in your Windows PC, but you have to delete any of these keys you can find.Chrome Installer Failed to Start

  3. Press the Win+R key combination on your keyboard to open the Run dialog, type in %LocalAppData% and press Enter. This will open the local App Data folder in the Windows File Explorer.Chrome Installer Failed to Start
  4. Locate the Google sub-folder inside the local app data folder and delete it.Chrome Installer Failed to Start
  5. That’s it. Now you can try installing Google Chrome browser once again and it should install without any problems.

Conclusion: Google Chrome may fail to install if the remnants of a previous version are still present on your PC. You can remove these remnants from your Windows PC and install the new version successfully.

4 comments

  1. I seeing this error (The installation failed to start” even on CLEAN systems (no prior installations of Chrome). This happened RECURRINGLY on two recently reformatted PC’s. One of them had Windows 8.1 Home 32-bit. This was on a tablet PC. The other one is on a Windows 7 64-bit based netbook. The Windows 8.1 machine “snapped out of it” at a LATER time, indicating a download problem, even with an offline installer. I tried the online installer on the Windows 7-based netbook, but still “The installer failed to start”. Again, these are CLEAN systems, never had Chrome on them before. They were RECENTLY reformatted. All affected computers were HP’s and had 32-bit OS’s (not 64-bit). These are computers belonging to my brother. The only other browser these machines had was IE. I think they all had IE 11 at the time of the attempted Chrome installations. The internet itself seems to be fine, for I can go to the “help” things, which don’t help me a bit, but CAN’T install Chrome. Again, the Windows 8.1 tablet “snapped” out of it at a LATER time (several hours later).

    1. UPDATE: I found two other possibilities that can cause this error, even on a “clean” system. I THINK my full installer, which I had copied onto a flash drive might have gotten corrupt, but not “bad” enough to cause an I/O error. Usually when installers “unpack” themselves, a checksum error will occur, thus aborting an installation error (integrity type error).

      Also, I went into the registry, much like some other people on here did, as if I had a “previous” installation of Google Chrome. There were MANY, MANY instances of Google Update in the registry, and I knocked a lot of this out. Basically, if it had anything to do with Google, except for Google.com, such as for a homepage, I knocked it out. After this, I did an online installation of Chrome, and it went on–in the FIRST ATTEMPT! There was also a few entries for Google Toolbar, which may have COME with the computer itself, but can’t remember for sure. So, in a way, it was a “clean” system (was recently reformatted), but “wasn’t clean”, maybe due to fragments left behind by an aborted installation attempt of Chrome (stopping at this error–CAN’T CONTINUE!), thus leaving a lot of clutter for Google Update–and that’s it–CAN’T CONTINUE. Anyway, it finally installed ok using the online installer. Perhaps Google can make a system clean-up package that a user can download and run that would clean all this up, such as “extraneous” Google entries in the registry that can “get in the way”. I also knocked out the Google folder from C:\Program Files (would probably be C:\Program Files (x86)” on a 64-bit machine. Again, both machines that I had this much trouble with were 32-bit systems, one being a tablet having Windows 8.1, and the other being a netbook running Windows 7. Please see that this gets to the R&D department, so maybe they can make a nice clean-up tool.

      From John Nozum

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