RebornDBA

One of my tasks today was to do an installation of a STD version of SQL 2005 on a 6 core machine. Unfortunately, the only image I had was a SP1 so I started with my prep as normal.
-    Get image across to the server
-    Download SP3
-    Start install
At this point I think ... mmm... How difficult could this be?, it is a simple install and I’ll be done in less than an hour. How wrong was I!... as the installation setup gets to the point where it tries to start SQL Server it returned a useful message:

Product: Microsoft SQL Server 2005 (64-bit) -- Error 29503. The SQL Server service failed to start. For more information, see the SQL Server Books Online topics, "How to: View SQL Server 2005 Setup Log Files" and "Starting SQL Server Manually."

I said ok, I’ll try to start the service manually, and I then get another useful message

"Error 1053: The service did not respond to the start or control request in a timely fashion"

I started to think that this must be a permission issue, so I tried to start the service with my admin account rather than the service account that I had used for the installation and the same error appeared.
I then go to the Event Viewer and I see the following error:

“Faulting application sqlservr.exe, version 2005.90.1399.0, faulting module sqlservr.exe, version 2005.90.1399.0, fault address 0x0000000000b323f0.”

So at this point I try to do a tintenet search and I get two results of which the only really useful one was:

http://blogs.msdn.com/psssql/archive/2008/07/23/sql-server-2005-encounters-exception-during-install-when-system-has-odd-number-of-processors-or-logical-processors-per-core.aspx

This enlightened me with the issue of Installing SQL Server 2005 sp1 with an odd number of logical processors which is corrected on the SP2. The workaround that Bob Dorr proposed sounded a bit aggressive as I don’t like the idea of striping dll’s from sp2 to overwrite the existing ones and the idea of being on a production unsupported situation is something that I’d rather not risk.

So you ask, how did I solve the issue? Well, on the setup of the actual server I disabled one of the processors to leave the box running with 2 logical processors. I restarted the installation and applied service pack in my case SP3. Once I was happy I returned the processors count the original one and Bob’s your uncle!

I hope you found this useful.

Regards,

David Castro