On Friday, I was looking to get the SNMP integration working on SQL Server. However, it turns out that to get this functionality, you need to have the SNMP server running when SQL Server is installed. Sadly this wasn’t the case. To fix this, I needed to uninstall SQL, check the SNMP server was running (as I’d now installed it) and reinstall SQL.

Sounds straightforward doesn’t it.. It wasn’t.

Uninstalling was the most straightforward part. When I tried to reinstall, I was told that the version of Visual Studio 2008 needed to be Service Packed (SP1), so I did that. Then when i tried to reinstall again, I started getting lots of other error messages which appeared to have assorted issues.

The resolutions to these issues were around corrupt registry settings (I cleaned those out), corrupt setup files (I changed the install location, which seemed a little random, as a fix) and corrupt ISO images (downloaded a fresh install, and I love my MSDN account, and the Fibre Internet connection!). None of these worked.

The last item I saw, at 10:30pm, on a Saturday night was to create a slipstream build of SQL Server 2008 R2, with SP1 in it, since this would resolve the issues in the installer files. I found a really useful article on creating this (http://blogs.msdn.com/b/petersad/archive/2011/07/13/how-to-slipstream-sql-server-2008-r2-and-a-sql-server-2008-r2-service-pack-1-sp1.aspx), and having followed that through, SQL successfully installed.

While this was a complete pain to fix, and did have me wondering if I’d need to rebuild the laptop, since I knew the ISO was fine (as I’d installed a VM from it during this whole process), it did help me as it’s been quite a while since I’ve had to deal with installer issues. Also, I’ve certainly never created a slipstream build of SQL Server, which I can now do.

It’s all good MCM Prep. 🙂