April 18, 2005
April CTP SQL Express Install Saga - Serious Setup Bug?
I am posting a description of how I hit an impasse when attempting to install April CTP of SQL Server 2005 Express on Windows XP SP1. This refers to the standalone version of SQL Server 2005 Express downloaded from here .
The machine had never had .NET 2.0 or associated Visual Studio 2005 or SQL Server 2005 components on it.
At the time of writing there is no working link to download .NET 2.0.50215 which SQL Server Express April CTP requires. So I used dotnetfx.exe from Visual Studio 2005 Beta 2 which I confirmed, before installing, was 2.0.50215.
After installing .NET 2.0 I confirmed that a v2.0.50215 directory had been added and had been populated.
SQL Express install initially progressed nicely. Extraction of files was ok, I accepted the EULA. SQL Server Component Update progressed smoothly.
On the System Configuration Check screen I hit a Reboot requirement (presumably from dotnetfx.exe). I had run dotnetfx.exe a second time since it did nothing after requiring a reboot. It didn't install anything but did, so it seems, add a wholly unnecessary reboot requirement.
I rebooted.
On the Registration Information screen I unchecked the Hide Advanced Configuration Options checkbox, since I wanted a full SQL Express install.
All seemed well until I got an error dialog indicating that I had to use an Administrator account to install on Windows XP1. Since I was using the Administrator account that hardly helped.
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Setup proceeded to install components but failed to install the Database Engine and the Books online etc.
I used Add/Remove Programs to attempt to get back to a clean position.
I uninstalled
- Microsoft SQL Server Setup Support Files
- Microsoft SQL Server Native Client
and then proceeded to attempt to run Setup again, while meticulously looking at every screen to see if there was some option I had missed which had caused the failure to install the Database Engine.
I did notice that SQLXML 4.0 and MSXML6 were not uninstalled.
The same error happened at the same point in the attempted setup.
I did consider doing another uninstall but since leaving SQLXML 4.0 and MSXML6 produced no additional error it didn't seem worthy trying.
I hope there is something peculiar about my machine that caused the problem. If not, then it looks as if April CTP of SQL Server 2005 Express won't install on Windows XP SP1.
Does anybody know of a workaround?
Posted by Andrew Watt at April 18, 2005 01:25 PM | TrackBackYou should upgrade to XP SP2 or download and install the new Windows Installer 3 separately.
Posted by: dotnetjunkie at April 19, 2005 01:42 AMLook in the Summary.txt file located in \Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\90\Setup Bootstrap\LOG. If you find that the install program doesn't have privileges to access a file called Config.Msi, it probably doesn't exist. Create an empty Text Document in the root and rename it to Config.msi. Then try to re-install. Worked for me!
Posted by: joe at June 11, 2005 06:23 PMYes, well some "bright" person placed a fail condition in the bootstrapper package.xml file that causes the install to fail if the version in Windows XP is less that 5.1.2 (XP SP2). This is an error and if you have VS.NET 2005 Beta 2, you can see the fail condition in the Bootstrapper SQL Server folder.
We are developing an application that bootstraps SQL Server Express as part of the install and once I edited the package xml file to remove the fail condition, it installed SQL Server Express fine on my test machine which is running Windows XP SP1
Posted by: Lisa-Mare at September 15, 2005 02:31 PM