How to diagnose "Operating system supported for edition" pre-requisite errors while installing SQL 2008 Standard Edition for Small Business

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[Today’s post comes to us courtesy of Damian Leibaschoff from Commercial Technical Support]

The requirements to install SQL 2008 Standard Edition for Small Business are documented on this post:

https://blogs.technet.com/b/sbs/archive/2009/03/23/requirements-for-installing-sql-2008-standard-edition-for-small-business.aspx

Under certain circumstances, you may encounter the block even though all the requirements seem to be met, here is a checklist of things to verify:

  • Make sure you are logged in as a domain administrator on the server where you are attempting the install. The SQL setup must be run while logged in to the domain with valid
    domain credentials. The user needs to have domain administrator and local administrator rights.
  • Confirm the domain environment health, the verification process needs to be able to talk to all your domain controllers.
  • If using SBS, do not use the SBS console to count the number of computers and users, you will have to rely on what is showing in the native Active Directory Users and Computers mmc.

You can also enable verbose logging to get detailed output of which test is failing so you can take corrective action.

To enable verbose logging perform the following steps:

  1. After you have experienced the block the first time, close the SQL setup.

  2. Open notepad as an administrator and save the following contents:

     <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?> 

<configuration> 

<system.diagnostics> 

<trace autoflush="true" /> 

<sources> 

<source name="SBSADCheck" switchType="System.Diagnostics.SourceSwitch" 

switchValue="Verbose"> 

<listeners> 

<add name="myListener" type="System.Diagnostics.TextWriterTraceListener" initializeData="log.txt" /> 

</listeners> 

</source> 

</sources> 

</system.diagnostics> 

</configuration>

  3. Save the file in %ProgramFiles%\Microsoft SQL Server\100\Setup Bootstrap\Release\x64\Setup100.exe.config (if you are installing SQL Server 2008 R2 for Small Business the path will be: %programfiles%\microsoft sql server\100\setup bootstrap\sqlserver2008r2\x64\Setup100.exe.config)

  4. Launch the SQL setup and run through to the block.

  5. Collect the Verbose log from %ProgramFiles%\Microsoft SQL Server\100\Setup Bootstrap\Release\x64\log.txt or %programfiles%\microsoft sql server\100\setup bootstrap\sqlserver2008r2\x64\log.txt