MrDave's (David Yack) Blog!

Yesterday I was trying to install the new SharePoint 2010 beta on a virtual machine and had a little bit of fun.  Well actually the install went really easy and I started with the full SharePoint 2010 Enterprise Beta.  The fun started with the configuration wizard it got 5 steps in and failed with a Timeout Exception.

After simply retrying it and getting the same thing I started looking around and found this forum post.  It talks about lack of memory and how SharePoint 2010 needs a lot of memory to install and I tried like mad to make sure the VM had enough memory.  End of the story this turned out to not be what was causing my blocking issue.  As a side note, I sure hope the SharePoint team doesn’t make it so SharePoint does need that much memory for a basic install as suggested. 

There is a good blog post by Jie Li that was linked to by the above forum post that was helpful.  First it had the product keys – Microsoft mailed me some but it took over 24 hours for me to get them (same ones) and nothing on the download pages really told me where to find them (at least I didn’t see it).  The post also has some hotfixes that you have to have depending on your OS and configuration.  Additionally, if your running on a domain controller which I was it had some setup to get the sandbox up and running.

Now back to the timeout exception, it was still happening and honestly if I didn’t need SharePoint for something I’m working on I would have thrown it to the side and not looked back.  Being determined I tried several different memory configurations and determined it had nothing to do with memory, and further through SQL profiling determined it wasn’t a database timeout either.  

From this forum post I got the idea it might be a service start up issue.  Originally, I didn’t pay enough attention to this post because it talked about a type not loading witch didn’t match my error.  Later in the post it talks about service not starting and to try it manually, that didn’t show the error either.  Additionally, it talked about registry keys to delete which turned out I didn’t have those keys.  Getting frustrated and desperate to get this configured I started to get more creative.  Since I was on a virtual machine I figured worse case I restart from last snapshot so I got brave and deleted a key at a time.  For me the following key did the trick and the config zoomed along past the error to a successful completion.

So which key?  Inside the following registry path..

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Shared Tools\Web Server Extensions\14.0\WSS\Services\

I deleted the following key

I’m normally not one to post about or suggest this type of black magic fix, but in this case it made the difference of me using the beta or not so here it is.