Logging for SQL Server Setup has changed in this release. The main log you should look at is l<drive>:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\100\Setup Bootstrap\LOG\Summary.txt

Each execution of Setup will generate a new time-stamped log folder. For example, if you launch the SQL Server Installation Center page, it gets its own time-stamped log folder, and each Setup action invoked from that page gets its own as well, so you will probably see several time-stamped log folders in this directory. The time-stamped log folder name format is YYYMMDD_hhmmss.

Detailed Setup logs are at the following location:

<drive>:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\100\Setup Bootstrap\LOG\.

When looking for errors in the detail log, search for the following phrases:

• Watson bucket
  
• Error:
  
• Exception has been
  

A typical Setup request goes through three execution phases:

1. Global rules check
   
2. Component update
   
3. User-requested action
   

Each of these phases will generate detail and summary logs, with additional log files being generated as appropriate. Setup is called at least three times per user-requested Setup action.

Typical log files generated will be:

• Detail_GlobalRules.txt
  
• Detail_ComponentUpdate.txt
  
• Detail.txt
  

The summary log file name format is Summary_[machine name]_timestamp_[execution phase]

The final summary log is copied to %Program Files%\Microsoft SQL Server\100\setup bootstrap\log folder and named Summary.txt for quick reference.

Note: Setup will not CAB the log files unless there is an error.

MSI actions performed during Setup generate their own log files in the following format: [product feature]_[cpu]_[LCID (optional)]_[attempt #].log. If an MSI execution fails, look in the associated MSI log for “return value 3” only for ENU versions.

Datastore files contain a snapshot of the state of all configuration objects being tracked by the Setup process, and are useful for troubleshooting configuration errors. XML file dumps are created for datastore objects for each execution phase. They are saved in their own log sub folder under the time-stamped log folder, as follows:

• Datastore_GlobalRules
  
• Datastore_ComponentUpdate
  
• Datastore
  

See Also