SQL Express silent installation.
I am writing an application that requires SQL Express to be installed alongside.
So I try to do the following - Before installing my application, I pop-up a link which leads to "SQLEXPR.exe ADDLOCAL=SQL_Engine INSTANCENAME=MSSQLServer <other parameters> /qb " .
But this displays only a basic GUI, which means that the pre-requisite checks for SQL express are not displayed to the user. So if MDAC version 2.8 is not present on the system the installation of SQLexpress fails without any error messages (except in the log files).
( This is not a problem with all pre-requisites :: If .NET is not present on the system, the failure is much more elegant. There is a nice GUI pop-up which requests the user to install .NET 2.0 before installing SQL express.)
On the other hand, If I remove the "/qb" switch, I can get the pre-requisites GUI to display and the end-user can figure out the cause of failure easily enough. But this means that the optional parameters I use, for example the instancename or the authentication mode will not be used during the install
Is there a good commandline switch I can use so that
1) The pre-requisites check screen is displayed
2) All the commandline options are used for installation.
Thanks
We have a request filed for the next version of the product to allow users to run the SCC Check outside of setup. We don't have anything that will do that in SQL Server 2005.
As for the command line options, you can look at the template.ini that is in the root of the install media. It has all of the options to pass to setup.exe. You can pass any msiexec.exe command line parameter to setup.exe as well.
Sorry that we don't have a way for you to pre-populate the GUI.
-Jeffrey
Thanks.
But I don't need to pre-populate the GUI before an install. All that is really needed is a GUI error message when installation fails.
This happens nicely enough when .NET version 2.0 is not present , even on a scripted install with a "/qb" option passed to the install, there is an appropriate error message.
But when MDAC is not present on the system, the install screen just vanishes without any error messages. I'll register with Microsoft to carry MDAC along with my distribution so that I can fix this, I can't have customers not being able to figure out why their install failed so I'd rather do a check for it myself and install MDAC.
But if there are more prerequisites which cause an install to fail without an error pop-up, I will have to do all of those checks myself outside the setup.exe before I call set-up.exe.
I do understand that there is a sample ini script, but what I don't know is the exact option I can pass so that I always get an error message on the GUI when an install fails (looks like the SCC check thing is not a "basic" Gui option )
Just for anyone else who is reading this thread
http://lab.msdn.microsoft.com/productfeedback/viewfeedback.aspx?feedbackid=7f04bc3d-35aa-46b3-bda0-1179ef577875
Won't be fixed in Yukon...
After some amount of testing, found that if you want to install sql express on W2KSP4 (not sp1) , you'll need to have .NET clr 2.0 and MDAC 2.8. Everything else should be on a default install of W2K.
One way of checking if you need MDAC is to check the registry key HKLM -> software-> Microsoft-> Data Access -> FullInstalledVersion to check if you need to install MDAC. (if you have MSDE installed earlier, the version will be 2.7.x while FullInstalledversion will be 2.8.y) .
