I was upgrading a WordPress MU site we work on and came across an annoying issue: core update wouldn't work the way it's supposed to. I got the following error:
Unpacking the update. Could not copy files. Installation Failed.
After a bit of Googling I found a thread in the WordPress forums that contained a gem of a fix:
In the file /wp-admin/includes/class-wp-upgrader.php change this:
// Copy update-core.php from the new version into place. if ( !$wp_filesystem->copy($working_dir . '/wordpress/wp-admin/includes/ update-core.php', $wp_dir . 'wp-admin/includes/update-core.php', true) ) {
To:
// Copy update-core.php from the new version into place. if ( !$wp_filesystem->copy($working_dir . '/wordpress-mu/wp-admin/includes/ update-core.php', $wp_dir . 'wp-admin/includes/update-core.php', true) ) {
And low and behold: my automatic upgrade worked at once.






Yep, it was a known issue with 2.8.1. :)
Hey Andrea, great to see you here :)
I keep having an auto upgrade issue with my standard wordpress installs where there is fatal memory error.
The fix is to increase 32m to 64m in the php.ini but for some reason it is rewritten as 32m after a while.
I still have the old auto uprade plugin installed for when this happens though as the memory fix hasnt worked a couple of times. So rather than uninstalling that old plugin I will be keeping it as a backup!
did you increase your WP_MEMORY_LIMIT in your wp-config as well?
Errr no, no-one mentioned that part in the fixes I found.
Right then - I know what to do next time it goes tits up - cheers!
Someone did say my web-host might not be pleased about me editing these settings - you think there is any truth in that?
Well it depends, if it's for an upgrade they shouldn't mind too much, if you need it all the time, you might be needing a VPS, or some decent speed up work on your WordPress. I don't know too many installs that really need 64 MB of ram...
I'm having a few upload images / upgrade wpmu version problems.
The images upload and crunch just fine, no error messages at all, the image size etc looks ok, I can see the images in my ftp program - the images show as a broken link.
When I try to Auto Upgrade my version of wpmu I get an error message: Downloading update from http://mu.wordpress.org/wordpress-mu-2.8.4a.zip.
Unpacking the update.
Warning: copy(/home/allthing/public_html/wp-content/upgrade/wordpress-mu-2.8.4a/wordpress/wp-admin/includes/update-core.php) [function.copy]: failed to open stream: No such file or directory in /home/allthing/public_html/wp-admin/includes/class-wp-filesystem-direct.php on line 131
Could not copy files.
Installation Failed
I know this a little off topic, but I spent the day searching for answers in forums, google etc etc and cant find any solutions.
Any ideas??
Stef
I need to transfer all my blogs under Wordpress MU. All blogs are under same top-level domain URL.
Can someone point me to person who has time and can to do it for me? Will pay of course.
I am also looking for help with transferring my blogs to WPMU. Please point me to someone.
Thanks
Thanks dude Im gonna try this out now. I have been having this issue on several older installs and have been overwriting the core manually which is only slightly more time consuming, but anything that saves time saves money. :)
omg - OMG!!! I got that fix to work! Thanks so much.
I tried it several times by copying and pasting the whole code, but it kept breaking down somewhere, in the end I just added the " -mu " to the url and viola! It worked!
Hello Matej,
We can transfer all your blogs under Wordpress MU.
Pandu
Thanks for the useful information !!