Today I started my second attempt of silent / command line installation of SQL Server 2005 September CTP.

I guess I should have mentioned in Part 1 that that install was attempted on Win XP Pro, SP1. This time I worked on a clean machine with a fresh Windows 2003 Standard Edition. This machine has 2 Intel Pentium 4 2.59 GHz processors and 1 GB RAM.

So, as in described in Part 1, I went to command line and fired the command.

2 seconds later, I got a message saying that this version of OS or Service Pack is not supported. All right, I pulled out my Windows 2003 Service Pack 1 DVD and installed that. I then started command line install again. So remember, SP 1 is needed on Windows 2003 prior to install.

It appeared to work initially. It looked like that prerequisite components were part of Service Pack 1, because this time it didn’t not ask for it. Therefore no mindless clicking was needed. The CD-Rom was spinning. Visual check of task manager showed there was a setup.exe process going. Would it succeed this time?

Not so fast:(. About 1 or 2 minutes later, CD-Rom stopped spinning and hard drive indicator stopped blinking. Could it finish so fast? I looked at Start->Program Files and nothing was there. I then looked at installation log file located at %ProgramFiles%\Microsoft SQL Server\90\Setup Bootstrap\LOG\Summary.txt. Below is the message I got:

KJLLJFD-3J6YDPO : Microsoft Internet Information Services (IIS) is either not installed or is disabled. IIS is required by some SQL Server features.  Without IIS, some SQL Server features will not be available for installation. To install all SQL Server features, install IIS from Add or Remove Programs in Control Panel or enable the IIS service through the Control Panel if it is already installed, and then run SQL Server Setup again. For a list of features that depend on IIS, see Features Supported by Editions of SQL Server in Books Online.

This is really annoying. Based on BOL, none of the components I selected in my .ini file requires IIS. Yet silent install stopped because IIS was not there. In GUI install, this is presented as a warning, but you can choose to ignore the warning and click Next and continue installation. In fact, that was what I had to do today to load it on this machine.

Oh well, this is disappointing. I will see how to file this as a bug to Microsoft, if it has not been done already.