SQL Server 2005 on Windows Vista

by Pierre Boisvenue. 24/05/2007 1:58:34 PM

Installing SQL Server 2005 on a Windows Vista? Welcome to my nightmare and be afraid very afraid. Note that this article was written at the time SP2 for SQL Server 2005 was released. My observations are as follows before installing any service packs.
  • Nice to have would be to have a disk image save of a previous virgin installation of Vista
  • Make sure that you have previously installed IIS 7 with the proper options
  • While installing SQL Server 2005 Developer edition on Windows Vista Business, if for any reason an option did not install correctly or an error occurred, stop to see if you can correct the situation and re-install. You should not have ANY error reported during installation. If you proceed anyways then good luck.
  • If you had previously installed Visual Studio 2005, like I did, this could cause side effects because of a previous SQL Server 2005 Express installation.
  • Uninstalling SQL Server 2005 may not allow you to re-install it correctly because of heavy use of registry entries

Installing SQL Server 2005 on Vista should be considered experimental at this point in time and be prepared to re-install Vista if you just can’t get SQL Server 2005 installed correctly.On my system I had installed VS 2005 first followed by SQL Server 2005 and was not able to install SQL Server 2005. So I restored my saved image back to the disk partition hosting Vista and managed to install SQL Server 2005 with zero errors. To note is that the only options selected was the Server Service and client component. I did not select Analysis, integration and reporting service.

I then proceeded to install Service Pack 2 of SQL Server 2005. Half way through the upgrade process, the upgrade crashed. Not impressed I ran the upgrade again and it picked up to the point where it left off and upgraded the rest successfully and SQL Server now appears to be working has expected. A new backup disk image was saved in case of future problems that may arise.

On a side note, I was under the impression that I was allowed to transfer a Vista license from one PC to another which I did. But having restored my inactivated vista from a disk image did not allowed me to re-activate my license and had to call Microsoft for reactivation.

SQL Server 2005, Windows Vista


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