Fixing a Broken MOSS 2007 Installation

I left a virtual machine in our development environment installing MOSS 2007 while I was in a meeting this morning (annual video about bloodborn pathogen safety, good times) and returned to see that the my machine (and the VM) had reboot while I was gone (I suspect foul play by someone’s heater popping the breaker).

I attempted to restart the installation and recieved:

“Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 encountered an error during setup.”

[Close]

Ehh, that’s not real helpful.  Nothing in the Event Viewer, nothing in the Logs directories…

After uninstalling EVERYTHING, even .NET 2.0 and 3.0, it still wouldn’t install.  While this is a virtual machine and I could just roll back to the base OS install, I wanted to know how to fix it (if this was a real box, I’d be looking at a reboot).

Searching the Internet didn’t turn very much up, so I tried the old faithful for failed installations, the Windows Installer CleanUp Utility.  This free application from the TechNet guys at Microsoft reads the registry KVPs out and allows you to selectively remove applications that no longer show up in Add/Remove Programs.

I removed the ghosts of the MOSS Search installation and reboot.  After the reboot, the installation proceeded as normal.

Tags: MOSS, MSI