A second (and third) attempt failed too, and each time I desperately opted to “tell Microsoft about this problem”, in the irrational hope that it would wake someone up at Redmond and that they would slide down an emergency fireman’s pole into the crisis and emergency centre and contact me immediately with a special fix.

Of course, no contact was made. So I rummaged through log files and scoured the web, but couldn’t find any relevant information. The error in the log file was:


Error: Action “ReportChainingResults” threw an exception during execution.
One or more packages failed to install. Refer to logs for error details. : 1612
Error Code: 0×8007064c (1612)
Windows Error Text: The installation source for this product is not available. Verify that the source exists and that you can access it.


Eventually, I managed to get around the problem. This is what I did.

In Add/Remove Programs:

1. Uninstalled SQL Server 2005 Samples
2. Uninstalled SQL 2005 Mobile Dev tools
3. Then, instead of uninstalling SQL Server 2005, I opted to “change” it.
   1. When the component selection list came up I selected Workstation components (there were no instances anyway!)
   2. After the system config check, I selected “Change Installed Components” and made sure everything was set to “Entire feature will be unavailable”. Next, next, etc and BINGO! It worked!

Then all I needed to do was uninstall some of the other thing in Add/Remove Programs, like backwards compatibility and native client.

I hope this helps some other poor sod.