This is one of the client contacts where I realized the importance of looking at right log file. The client said that he double clicks the.exe, a window flash by and disappears. It looked like something was happening, but it’s failing to move forward. Let us learn a very rare but critical error about setup screen not launching while updating a patch.

I looked into the documentation of setup and found this link https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms143702.aspx (View and Read SQL Server Setup Log Files)

I looked into Bootstrap folder, but there were no logs getting generated so I asked to check %temp% (Start > Run > type %temp%) folder and found one file with current timestamp called as SqlSetup.log. Here are the last few lines

In the Sqlsetup.log, it raises an error at the end:

09/09/2016 13:02:20.411 .Net version 3.5 is already installed.
09/09/2016 13:02:20.411 Windows Installer version 4.5 is already installed.
09/09/2016 13:02:20.411 Patch related actions cannot be run from the local setup.exe, so continuing to run setup.exe from the media.
09/09/2016 13:02:20.411 Attempt to initialize SQL setup code group
09/09/2016 13:02:20.411 Attempting to determine security.config file path
09/09/2016 13:02:20.411 Checking to see if policy file exists
09/09/2016 13:02:20.411 .Net security policy file does exist
09/09/2016 13:02:20.411 Attempting to load .Net security policy file
09/09/2016 13:02:20.411 Error: Cannot load .Net security policy file
09/09/2016 13:02:20.411 Error: InitializeSqlSetupCodeGroupCore (64bit) failed
09/09/2016 13:02:20.411 Error: InitializeSqlSetupCodeGroup failed: 0x80004005
09/09/2016 13:02:20.411 Setup closed with exit code: 0x80004005

All I can see is that there is something wrong with .NET security. I asked my .NET expert friend to know if there is any tool to reset the permission? He told CASPOL.EXE can be used to reset the policies.

SOLUTION

We went into following directory “C:\WINDOWS\Microsoft.NET\Framework64\v2.0.50727” and ran this command: –  caspol.exe -machine -reset

C:\WINDOWS\Microsoft.NET\Framework64\v2.0.50727>caspol.exe -machine -reset

If it would have been a 32-bit machine, we would have run the same command under “C:\WINDOWS\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v2.0.50727” folder.

After doing above, SQL setup was able to start and finish as well.

Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com)

First appeared on SQL SERVER – Setup Screen Not Launching While Updating a Patch