Installing VSTS has not been easy. But at least progress is being made.

My first big hurdle was getting past the problem where the instructions said to configure ADAM using one set of port numbers, while my computer refused to do so. I solved that in my last VSTS post, by accepting my computers defaults and ignoring the instructions.

My second big hurdle came during the install of the application server (Team Foundation). If you'll recall, I am installing the application tier in a Virtual PC 2004 instance. I tried installing VSTF directly from the DVD. I tried it a couple of times, but each time it failed reading one of the files from the DVD. I tried accessing that file directly from Windows Explorer inside Virtual PC, and no luck.

My first suspect was the DVD (media) itself. I tried that DVD in a different computer and it worked. So it appears the DVD is fine.

So of course I then suspected the external DVD player I was using. So I downloaded and installed the latest firmware upgrades from the manufacturer and retried the install. No luck.

Now I realize that you can “Capture an ISO” and use it as a drive image. So I tried buring this DVD to ISO. No luck - Virtual PC did not recognize it as a valid ISO.

Finally, I just XCOPY'ed the files into a shared folder. That worked.

It turns out, from this Ask Burton blog entry, that Virtual PC does not support DVD's over 2GB. What? Well, several hours of my life lost for nothing.

That problem solved, I am now facing my third major hurdle. This time, I am really getting frustrated. The install goes all the way to the end, apparently creates a bunch of databases, and then dies with a mysterious 26201 and 26204 errors. Ask Burton again has some hints.

My problem is that the database tier almost completely installs. So I know we have connectivity, the database is running, app server has rights to the database, etc. Ugh. I am painstakingly cleaning the DB server up after each attempt.

I think I might finally worked past the SQL DB issues, but I am not sure. The last time I ran the install, it completed everything and then did a rollback on its own. I'll give it one last try tonight.