is to accidentally run an MSDE install on the same machine.
I managed to do this today, while testing a custom installation. Instead of running it in my Virtual PC instance, I ran it on my desktop. When I rebooted, the SQL server popped up a message box saying that the installation had been tampered with and that I should uninstall and reinstall.
The great thing about that was that neither the SQL Server, or the MSDE installer would uninstall via the Add/Remove Programs option.
I ended up performing the following steps to get things up and running again:
- Copy the contents of my data directory to a new folder, so I could sp_attach_db later.
- Open up regedit and search for Microsoft Sql Server, and delete anything I found that matched
- Reboot
- Reinstalled Microsoft Sql Server and SP3
- Copied the databases back, and performed an sp_attach_db on them to get the server to see them.
Ultimately, this ended up only costing me a half a day of time on an already late project. I suppose it could have been worse.