SCCM: Program failed (download failed – content mismatch) for advertisement failures

Today I was noticing on a few of our advertisements that all of our machines in the collection had received the "Program failed (download failed - content mismatch)" failure message. Upon receiving this error message, I came across a blog post by Matthew Boyd that referred to the following:

Binary Differential Replication – If this is enabled in the package configuration, some packages seem to fail. I’m assuming that they can’t handle this kind of replication and several of the files become corrupt, creating a hash mismatch. This can be turned off by opening up the package properties, going to the Data Source tab, and unchecking Enable binary differential replication. This wasn’t my problem because I hadn’t enabled binary differential replication.

Hidden Files – Apparently, if the package source contains hidden files, SCCM may not calculate the correct hash for the package and clients could encounter an error. I found a quick way to check this using the command line:

1. Open up a command window in the root director that contains your package source files.
2. Type Dir /S /A:H and hit enter. Depending on the package, you may be presented with several directories with multiple hidden files.
3. Trying to remove the hidden attribute on all the files with the GUI would be tedious, so just use this command instead: attrib -H /S
4. Update Distribution Points

For my environment, BDR has never been an issue with content mismatches. So for the specific package I was working on I looked at my package source and sure enough there were some hidden files in the source.

So my next step was to look at my entire package source folder and I noticed that there were a lot of packages that had some hidden files. I went through their advertisement reports and sure enough, these packages also had content mismatch failures.

Thanks to Matthew for posting the tip.

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