Microsoft released SP2 for SQL Server 2008 R2 a couple weeks ago and I’ve been applying it to my servers. Most of the time it installed without problems, but I encountered a very puzzling error on one server. When I ran the service pack installation, I saw a DOS window pop and and disappear quickly and nothing else happened. The temporary directory that the service pack process creates was deleted.

I managed to get a copy of the temporary directory from another server while I was installing the service pack there and moved it to my troublesome server, so I could see what was happening before it got deleted. I opened an administrative DOS prompt so I could see any errors without it closing. When I ran setup.exe from the command prompt, all I saw was the copyright notice for the  service pack:

Microsoft (R) SQL Server 2008 R2 Setup 10.50.4000.00
Copyright (c) Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.

Then I was dropped back to the command prompt. As far as I could tell, no log files were created. I checked the normal SQL installation log file location (C:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\100\Setup Bootstrap) but that directory did not exist. UAC was disabled on this machine. I cleared the IE cache, rebooted the machine, and even verified the Windows Installer service was running. I also checked Windows Update and applied all the patches the machine needed. None of that solved my problem.

This was very strange. Without a log, I didn’t know how I was going to troubleshoot this. A couple suggestions from the forums at SQLServerCentral.com pointed me in the direction of .NET, so I went into Add / Remove Programs and did a Repair in the .NET installation. That completed, but did not solve the problem.

Not believing Microsoft wouldn’t make a log file somewhere, I searched the hard drive for recently created files. Bingo! I found a log file at C:\Users\<username>\AppData\Local\Temp\SqlSetup.log. Opening that showed me some steps the installer was trying to do. The last few lines were:

08/02/2012 06:54:45.749 Attempt to initialize SQL setup code group
08/02/2012 06:54:45.751 Attempting to determine security.config file path
08/02/2012 06:54:45.763 Checking to see if policy file exists
08/02/2012 06:54:45.764 .Net security policy file does exist
08/02/2012 06:54:45.766 Attempting to load .Net security policy file
08/02/2012 06:54:45.772 Error: Cannot load .Net security policy file
08/02/2012 06:54:45.774 Error: InitializeSqlSetupCodeGroupCore(64bit) failed
08/02/2012 06:54:45.777 Error: InitializeSqlSetupCodeGroup failed: 0x80004005
08/02/2012 06:54:45.779 Setup closed with exit code: 0x80004005

Hmm. It seemed the problem was related to .NET after all. Someone else had a similar problem and posted about it at http://www.sqlservercentral.com/Forums/Topic1262389-391-4.aspx. The solution for that person was to reset the .NET security policy file using the caspol.exe utility. I tried that and it did not solve my problem. However, the error log still seemed to indicate this file was the issue, so I did some more digging. I found this post from Microsoft giving the location of the security policy files. The previous post said one way to restore your system to a useable state was simply to delete these files. So that’s what I did. When I re-ran the SP2 installtion, I had the same issue and, more surprisingly, the logfile still included the line “.Net security policy file does exist”.

So I searched the entire drive for all occurances of Security.config and Security.cch and found another copy in the C:\Users\<username>\AppData\Roaming directory. Once I deleted that, the SP2 installation program was able to run.