Oh the joy of operating on the cutting edge: Windows Server 2008 64 bit, Hyper-V, Visual Studio 2008 and SQL 2008 64 bit, I am just asking for it!

As we properly partition our servers and dev workstations, we don’t just throw everything on the default C drive and hope for the best. Instead we reserve the C drive for the OS and use the E drive for all applications.

For some reason this concept is beyond the SQL 2008 installer. Even when specifying the installation path it installs parts on the C drive. As a result when subsequently installing VS2008 you have no option other than accepting the C drive unless you uninstall the specified SQL bits. (The VS installer is fortunately quite clear on this)

So we uninstalled the specified SQL bits, installed VS2008 and SP1 and then ran a SQL repair to get the missing SQL bits back in place. Unfortunately the SQL Installer fails horribly with a very friendly –2147467259 Unspecified error…sigh.

A quick look in the installation logs shows that the installer is looking for ‘C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 9.0\Common7\IDE\devenv.exe.config’. Great…. that file is on the E drive. Let’s see if we can fool the installer by copying that file from the E drive to the C drive.

Believe it or not, this fools the installer and it completes without errors. The only problem is that it leaves a number of SQL Design libraries (Reporting service, SSIS etc) for Visual Studio on the C drive. I don’t think it will work from there so I moved all content from

     C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 9.0

to

     E:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 9.0

OK, we are getting somewhere. The only thing left to do is to repoint the 500 odd registry entries that point to ‘C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 9.0’ to the E drive. We did it largely by hand, but with hindsight we should have used a simple registry search and replace utility.

Anyway, all seems to be working well. Fingers crossed for when the next service pack needs to be installed.

For those who are interested, the full error in the installation log file was as follows:

<Func Name='Do_sqlCopyXML'>
_LoadXMLFile(C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 9.0\Common7\IDE\devenv.exe.config).IID_IXMLDOMDocument->load returned 2147500037.
        Error Code: -2147467259
Windows Error Text: Unspecified error
  Source File Name: sqlca\sqlxmlca.cpp
Compiler Timestamp: Thu Jul  3 22:23:09 2008
     Function Name: Do_sqlCopyXML
Source Line Number: 616