Installation of a certification authority fails with error message "The Certification Authority is already installed."

Assume the following scenario:

  • A certification authority is installed.
  • An error occurred during installation that required a retry.
  • The certification authority role was uninstalled and then the role configuration was tried again.
  • The role configuration fails with the following error message:
The Certification Authority is already installed. If you are trying to reinstall the role service, you must first uninstall it.

Cause

May occur if artifacts from the previous CA installation remain in the registry, for example, if the installation was done with a script and this script made configuration settings downstream.

First, make sure that the Certification Authority role is really uninstalled. This can be done with the following Windows PowerShell command.

Remove-WindowsFeature Adcs-Cert-Authority

Then the registry path for the certification authority must be deleted.

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\CurrentControlSet\Services\CertSvc
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