Hadoop on Windows Building/ Installation Error

I am trying to install Apache Hadoop 2.7.1 on Windows x64 (8.1 and Server 2012 R2), but I am failing at goal:

    [INFO] Apache Hadoop Common ............................... FAILURE [ 37.925 s]

In the past days, I think I followed the steps of all tutorials, like HadoopOnWindows, or this one. I did all the prerequisites, but as I Googled, the relevant ones for my problem are the following:

Set path to MSBuild.exe like: C:\Windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework64\v4.0.30319; in Path
Set path to CMake
Install Microsoft SDK 7.1 and Run with its Microsoft SDK 7.1 CMD
Tried to build: hadoop-common\src\main\winutils\libwinutils.sln and hadoop-common\src\main\winutils\winutils.sln with Visual Studio 2013, but building fails due to compiling errors. Visual Studio 2010 doesn't even want to open them. I do not know how to correct the compile errors (in case this is the problem)

Other ppl, similar problem
Some of the similar topics I am following are these: one, two, three, four. I mainly tried all the suggestions, but it still breaks.

Error

    [INFO] BUILD FAILURE
    [INFO] ------------------------------------------------------------------------
    [INFO] Total time: 01:11 min
    [INFO] Finished at: 2015-07-08T15:18:29+02:00
    [INFO] Final Memory: 69M/269M
    [INFO] ------------------------------------------------------------------------
    [ERROR] Failed to execute goal org.codehaus.mojo:exec-maven-plugin:1.3.1:exec (c
    ompile-ms-winutils) on project hadoop-common: Command execution failed. Process
    exited with an error: 1 (Exit value: 1) -> [Help 1]
    [ERROR]
    [ERROR] To see the full stack trace of the errors, re-run Maven with the -e swit
    ch.
    [ERROR] Re-run Maven using the -X switch to enable full debug logging.
    [ERROR]
    [ERROR] For more information about the errors and possible solutions, please rea
    d the following articles:
    [ERROR] [Help 1] http://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/MAVEN/MojoExecutionE
    xception
    [ERROR]
    [ERROR] After correcting the problems, you can resume the build with the command

    [ERROR]   mvn <goals> -rf :hadoop-common

Help
I have no idea what to do next, I feel like I tried everything. Please help me solve this error and continue with the Hadoop install on Windows.

UPDATE 1 Looking on the error stack more closely, I saw that the file Microsoft.Cpp.props was not found. Moreover, the entire folder Program Files (x86)/MSBuild was missing. Thus, I installed Visual Studio 2010 and it fixed this problem.

Of course, a new problem arise. I am able to build libwinutils, but not winutils. I get many LNK2001 errors:

Error   48  error LNK1120: 18 unresolved externals  C:\hdfs\hadoop-common-project\hadoop-common\src\main\winutils\x64\Release\winutils.exe  winutils
Error   36  error LNK2001: unresolved external symbol BuildServiceSecurityDescriptor    C:\hdfs\hadoop-common-project\hadoop-common\src\main\winutils\service.obj   winutils
Error   32  error LNK2001: unresolved external symbol ChownImpl C:\hdfs\hadoop-common-project\hadoop-common\src\main\winutils\service.obj   winutils
Error   40  error LNK2001: unresolved external symbol CreateEnvironmentBlock    C:\hdfs\hadoop-common-project\hadoop-common\src\main\winutils\task.obj  winutils
Error   44  error LNK2001: unresolved external symbol CreateLogonTokenForUser   C:\hdfs\hadoop-common-project\hadoop-common\src\main\winutils\task.obj  winutils
Error   41  error LNK2001: unresolved external symbol DestroyEnvironmentBlock   C:\hdfs\hadoop-common-project\hadoop-common\src\main\winutils\task.obj  winutils
Error   37  error LNK2001: unresolved external symbol EnableImpersonatePrivileges   C:\hdfs\hadoop-common-project\hadoop-common\src\main\winutils\service.obj   winutils
Error   34  error LNK2001: unresolved external symbol GetSecureJobObjectName    C:\hdfs\hadoop-common-project\hadoop-common\src\main\winutils\service.obj   winutils
Error   38  error LNK2001: unresolved external symbol KillTask  C:\hdfs\hadoop-common-project\hadoop-common\src\main\winutils\service.obj   winutils
Error   43  error LNK2001: unresolved external symbol LoadUserProfileForLogon   C:\hdfs\hadoop-common-project\hadoop-common\src\main\winutils\task.obj  winutils
Error   35  error LNK2001: unresolved external symbol LogDebugMessage   C:\hdfs\hadoop-common-project\hadoop-common\src\main\winutils\service.obj   winutils
Error   46  error LNK2001: unresolved external symbol LookupKerberosAuthenticationPackageId C:\hdfs\hadoop-common-project\hadoop-common\src\main\winutils\task.obj  winutils
Error   31  error LNK2001: unresolved external symbol MIDL_user_allocate    C:\hdfs\hadoop-common-project\hadoop-common\src\main\winutils\hadoopwinutilsvc_s.obj    winutils
Error   30  error LNK2001: unresolved external symbol MIDL_user_free    C:\hdfs\hadoop-common-project\hadoop-common\src\main\winutils\hadoopwinutilsvc_s.obj    winutils
Error   47  error LNK2001: unresolved external symbol RegisterWithLsa   C:\hdfs\hadoop-common-project\hadoop-common\src\main\winutils\task.obj  winutils
Error   33  error LNK2001: unresolved external symbol SplitStringIgnoreSpaceW   C:\hdfs\hadoop-common-project\hadoop-common\src\main\winutils\service.obj   winutils
Error   42  error LNK2001: unresolved external symbol UnloadProfileForLogon C:\hdfs\hadoop-common-project\hadoop-common\src\main\winutils\task.obj  winutils
Error   45  error LNK2001: unresolved external symbol UnregisterWithLsa C:\hdfs\hadoop-common-project\hadoop-common\src\main\winutils\task.obj  winutils
Error   39  error LNK2001: unresolved external symbol wsceConfigRelativePath    C:\hdfs\hadoop-common-project\hadoop-common\src\main\winutils\service.obj   winutils

UPDATE 2 The answer from @tiho solved the problem mentioned above (and I am very thankful, as it took me 4 days already). Now, a fresh new problem, at goal:

[INFO] Apache Hadoop KMS .................................. FAILURE [  1.531 s]

[ERROR] Failed to execute goal org.apache.maven.plugins:maven-antrun-plugin:1.7:run (dist) on project hadoop-kms: An Ant BuildException has occured: java.net.UnknownHostException: archive.apache.org
[ERROR] around Ant part ...<get dest="downloads/apache-tomcat-6.0.41.tar.gz" skipexisting="true" verbose="true" src="http://archive.apache.org/dist/tomcat/tomcat-6/v6.0.41/bin/apache tomcat-6.0.41.tar.gz"/>... @ 5:182 in C:\hadoop-2.7.1-src\hadoop-common project\hadoop-kms\target\antrun\build-main.xml: Unknown host archive.apache.org.

I found a lame work-around to the problem above. I manually downloaded it, added to the folders:

C:\hadoop-2.7.1-src\hadoop-common-project\hadoop-kms\downloads
C:\hadoop-2.7.1-src\hadoop-hdfs-project\hadoop-hdfs-httpfs\downloads
and deleted from the files:
C:\hadoop-2.7.1-src\hadoop-common-project\hadoop-kms\target\antrun\build-main.xml
C:\hadoop-2.7.1-src\hadoop-hdfs-project\hadoop-hdfs-httpfs\target\antrun\build-main.xml
the following lines of code:

<mkdir dir="downloads"/>
  <get dest="downloads/apache-tomcat-6.0.41.tar.gz" skipexisting="true" verbose="true" src="http://archive.apache.org/dist/tomcat/tomcat-6/v6.0.41/bin/apache-tomcat-6.0.41.tar.gz"/>

Note that I am also using proxy, I have set the proxy in the settings.xml, and set PATH to MAVEN_OPTS as suggested in the same answer from @tiho. Is this the problem? besides the options suggested there, I have also added password and username to the MAVEN_OPTS.

Note that I can access: http://archive.apache.org/dist/tomcat/tomcat-6/v6.0.41/bin/apache-tomcat-6.0.41.tar.gz using my browser.

But I am still curious how to solve the issue correctly, because this problem continues to appear, and I need to do the same work-around again.

Update 3 That being said, the happiest moment of this week:

[INFO] ------------------------------------------------
[INFO] BUILD SUCCESS
[INFO] ------------------------------------------------
[INFO] Total time: 21:05 min
[INFO] Finished at: 2015-07-10T11:33:17+02:00
[INFO] Final Memory: 228M/672M
[INFO] ------------------------------------------------

Solution

Took me the whole day to manage to build it... Microsoft has obviously lots of issues with backward compatibility. It would help if Hadoop would move to a more recent toolchain.

Here are the key steps I had to perform (beyond those mentioned in the doc). This is using the Windows SDK compiler rather than VS 2010 (it is supposed to be possible with VS 2010 but I haven't tried it):

Uninstall Visual Studio 2013 (I would recommend uninstalling any Visual Studio >= 2010) -- this is to get rid of error MSBUILD : Configuration error MSB4146: Cannot evaluate the property expression "$([MSBuild]::ValueOrDefault('$(VCTargetsPath)','$(MSBuildExtensionsPath32)\Microsoft.Cpp\v4.0\V120\'))"
Uninstall Visual Studio C++ 2010 Redistributable (x64 + x86) -- to avoid Error when installing windows SDK 7.1
Uninstall fully .NET Framework 4.5 -- to avoid Failure during conversion to COFF: file invalid or corrupt
Reboot
Install .NET Framework 4.0
Install Windows SDK 7.1

I added to my PATH (in the Windows SDK shell) the bin folder of my Git installation (for GNU tools), the bin folder of CMake, and the folder containing protoc.exe. In addition (but most people should not need it), I had to setup Maven to use my HTTP proxy, first editing settings.xml as indicated in Maven's documentation, but also by defining the environment variable MAVEN_OPTS=-Dmy.proxy.host -Dhttp.proxyPort=my.proxy.port, as otherwise there was a timeout at some point during the build.

Note that I noticed a good amount of warnings during the build: I suspect some of them to be caused by using the Java SDK 1.8 instead of 1.7. However after finally seeing a BUILD SUCCESS I didn't feel like trying again with 1.7.