Gotta love SQL installs! Actually, normally they go pretty well for me, until now. I am attempting an install on SQL Server 2008 R2 Express on Server 2008 with SP2. It was going pretty slow at first, but now it has simply stopped! It seems to be stuck on 'InstallsqlcoreinstCpu64Action' This is the second time this has happened in a row, but the first time it didn't even make it to naming the instance, etc.

1. Sqlwriter.exe Sql Server Vss Writer - 64-bit

I just CANNOT install SQL Server Express 2008. During first phase of installation i get this error message from a caspol.exe window telling me that.

The log apparently tells me nothing - other than what I know which is that the installer has stopped responding. I have pasted the last few lines at the bottom of the post.

So, first off - why is this hanging? And secondly, what do I need to do with the current hung install? What are the repercussions of hitting 'cancel' on this screen?

What should be my next steps? Well I don't know why it happens but I had the exact same problem when we deployed Sharepoint 2010. Server 2008 R2 with SQL Server 2008 SP2 Standard. 64 bit of course.

It would start installing and then hang for about 10-15 minutes in the middle of the install, until we killed it. The workaround I found (we had to install this about 10 times to get Sharepoint working:O) ), was to open task manager and you would see two msiexec.exe applications running. You have a 50/50 shot of killing the right one. Kill one and if you got it right, then the application continues to install.

Kill the wrong one, you have to start the install over again. Hope that helps. Well, turns out that it could possibly be something completely unrelated - maybe.

Last week we had a HD go bad (we are running RAID so it only caused some minor issues). It was replaced and all seemed to be going well. However, when I interrupted the SQL server install it took a while to close and then completely locked up the server so that I had to do a hard reset. Everything came back up fine (but it was doing this last night as well, but I thought it was having an issue with an update that I was installing). Well, as I was looking at the event viewer, there are hundreds of these warnings in successive blocks of about 25-50 at one time over the past couple of days. Could this be the culprit?

I'm not sure what it is yet, but it doesn't look normal! LOL Event 129, MegaSR1 Reset to device, Device RaidPort0, was issued. Thanks for the info. The server that I am referring to here is also one that was upgraded; however, we have another that was a fresh install and as you stated it worked perfectly fine on that one, which is why I was so frustrated.

However, I worked it out. I had a 3rd server that used to be our old server before the aforementioned 2 and this install of 2008 SQL Server went really well. I will just use this one in the farm. Now my only lingering problem is that I think my failed install of the on the upgraded Server 2008 caused some weird issues on some other areas of the server (such as Service Writer not being present in the vsswriter list and throwing tons of errors!) Additionally, I cannot uninstall the failed installation of SQL 2008 either. I have tried both with appwiz.cpl and manually using cmd; however, the uninstall always fails and states that nothing was really installed.

Which is not really the case - it was about 1/2 installed! Hopefully I will get this rectified sooner than later!

Thanks again! I stumbled across this thread today - and recall I had a very similar issue where the install would always hang - and never get past that point. The problem (in my situation) was that I was specifying a non-standard directory for my data files, and in that directory, there existed several sub directories containing thousands of files (don't ask why they were there:-) for some reason the installer was trying to do some sort of validation (not sure what but I found the log after a lot of digging) on each and every file in those sub directories.

Sqlwriter.exe Sql Server Vss Writer - 64-bit

When I moved them out of the data folder and re-tried the install, it worked like a charm. Hope this helps someone.