I blogged about my 2 failed attempts of silent / command line install of SQL Server 2005 September CTP. So I filed a bug here on MSDN. I am impressed that Microsoft responded very quickly, saying this is not a bug. Thanks to whoever closed the bug. That was a real quick response:) I will redo my test asap to find out.

The reason that it is not a bug, according to the report, is that, Quote:

The message you’re seeing in the Summary.txt file is not why setup is failing. Your missing parameters for the services. From the template.ini:
;——————————————————————–
; The services for SQL Server and Analysis Server are set auto start. To use the *ACCOUNT settings
; make sure to specify the DOMAIN, e.g. SQLACCOUNT=DOMAINNAME\ACCOUNT
; NOTE: When installing SQL_Engine 3 accounts are REQUIRED: SQLACCOUNT, AGTACCOUNT and SQLBROWSERACCOUNT.

; SQLACCOUNT Examples:
; SQLACCOUNT=<domain\user>
; SQLACCOUNT=”NT AUTHORITY\SYSTEM”
; SQLACCOUNT=”NT AUTHORITY\NETWORK SERVICE”
; SQLACCOUNT=”NT AUTHORITY\LOCAL SERVICE”

; Note: To install localized versions of SQL Server, refer to the Localized Service Names table in the SQL Server Books Online topic “Setting Up Windows Service Accounts”

; Note that if SQLBrowser is already installed, SQLBROWSERACCOUNT and SQLBROWSERPASSWORD are ignored.

SQLBROWSERACCOUNT=
SQLBROWSERPASSWORD=

SQLACCOUNT=
SQLPASSWORD=

AGTACCOUNT=
AGTPASSWORD=

End Quote

Now I have 3 suggestions for the Installation help file, located at D:\SQL Server x86\Servers\Setup\help\1033\setupsql9.chm:

1. In the section titled How to: Install SQL Server 2005 from the Command Prompt, it has this to say about accounts:

[SQLACCOUNT], [SQLPASSWORD], [AGTACCOUNT], [AGTPASSWORD], [ASACCOUNT], [ASPASSWORD], [RSACCOUNT], and [RSPASSWORD]
This is information for the Service Accounts dialog box. If these parameters are not specified, Setup defaults to the LocalSystem account.

This is where it thrown me off. I intended to use LocalSystem account for startup, that is why I didn’t specify them in my config .ini file in the first place. This part of the documentation needs to be corrected, if the person who closed the bug is correct;

2. In the first post, I suggested that it would be helpful to have a template.ini file as a starting point. It turned out the setup DVD does have them, but it is nowhere mentioned in the section help file mentioned above. One would think that would be a logical place to mention them. By the way, I did visually check if I could found them on the DVD, however, I checked the wrong folder (D:\SQL Server x86\Servers\Setup). There are actually 2 copies of template.ini and they appear identical. They are located at D:\SQL Server x86\Servers and D:\SQL Server x86\Tools, respectively.

3. In the same section of the file, one command line example given was:

Setup.EXE /settings C:/set.ini /qn

This is incorrect. It should be a back slash \ after C: Unless, of course, this is Microsoft’s first step of porting SQL Server to *nix;)

All right, I will start over again. I will report back my results in a separate post;)