I have been busy lately installing this new upgrade on my clients' networks and mostly it has gone quite well, until this past weekend!! At the beginning of the installation, I found that there was not enough free disk space on the C: drive to install everything. SBS wants about 1.2 GB free. It doesn't really use it all, but it thinks it will. The client workstations should also have about 200 MB of free space to install all the new client applications as well. My drive was a bit shy. So, I performed disk compression and freed up the needed space. I did this with the SBS installation program still running and waiting for me to proceed. I don't think this was what caused my catastrophe but it's as good a scapegoat as any. 

Somewhere early on I received a very obscure error message stating that an error had occurred and that the installation would not succeed. It did not force me to stop nor even suggest that I do so. So I continued. Everything seemed to go fine. At least until almost the very end. At that point, while attempting to install the Small Business Server Administrator, the process stopped! I had to look carefully to see a new item on the task bar. It said, very informatively, 'Error'. 

 Clicking on this brought up a hidden message box with an 'OK' button. Pressing this button brought up a second message box stating that a C++ Runtime Error had occurred with the message 'The specified module could not be found. C:\Temp\BOS10.tmp\Setupbo.exe'. Looking in the directory I did find 'Setupbo.exe' so that must not be what was missing. But the message gave no other clue as to what the problem was! I tried several more times to run the install. It had loaded almost everything except the Windows NT Option Pak 4, the Small Business Server Administrator, and the Client Applications. It failed to load these every time. 

 Having attended the Small Business Server 4.5 Advanced course, I brought out my manuals. In there I found that setup keeps a log of the setup process. All I had to do was look at this log and see where it failed and that might give me a clue. The log is SetupLog.txt and is found in the %systemroot% (C:\WINNT normally) directory. I found the file but it was from the 4.0 install! So much for the accuracy of that documentation. There was no log I could find from the current installation attempt. 

 Time to bring in the big guns! I called Microsoft Technical Support and opened an 'incident'. Although the technician was very anxious to help, he was clueless too. He did try to give me a couple of thing to try, which unfortunately did not work. 

A suggestion he made which had me thinking was to create a set of NT installation disks. When all else failed, I decided to give this a try. The manual that came with the upgrade package even has a section on how to do it. Pretty standard fair if you're familiar with NT. So I got three blank floppies, inserted the proper CD and gave it a go. But, NO GO! Seems that the upgrade package does not contain the operating system files needed to install NT, especially the WINNT32.exe. Remember this is an upgrade, free at that, and apparently depends on your having a useable installed version already running on your server. So much for that manual as well! 

 One thing my Microsoft tech told me to do was a 'cold boot'. I did this and of course it did not change anything. However, when the system was login on, it came up with an error message saying it could not find 
C:\Program Files\Microsoft BackOffice\CHECKEULA.exe.

 This obscure message turned out to be the key to eventually fixing the problem. Emphasis on 'Eventually'. CHECKEULA.exe is a program that asks the user to accept or reject the End User License Agreement (EULA). Somehow this program was being run from the startup. I checked the directory and found it was empty except for a single file called 'Setupbo.ini'. This file contained a list of numerous files in the C:\Temp\BOS10.tmp directory. (Actually, each time you run setup, it creates a new Temp file named C:\TEMP\BOSxx.tmp where the xx changes each time). 

The temp directory on the other hand was full of 'stuff', including the CHECKEULA.exe! I copied this file over to the C:\Program Files\Microsoft BackOffice directory and rebooted once again. This time the CHECKEULA program ran and asked me to accept the license agreement. I did. This got me to thinking. If the CHECKEULA was supposed to be in that directory, then what else should be? I decided to copy all the other files from the BOS10.tmp into the BackOffice directory. Then I ran Setup yet another time. Guess what! This time it worked!! Apparently the 'module' that Setupbo.exe needed was supposed to be in the C:\Program Files\Microsoft BackOffice directory. I'm still not sure which file it was looking for but it was one of those I copied from the BOS10.tmp. Later I compared the contents of this directory with that of another customer whose upgrade had gone well and found that all the files, except a couple of minor text files had been included. 

 Next month I'll try to include some of the nifty new stuff that makes the upgrade all worthwhile. In the meantime, some tips on installing the upgrade would be to first be sure you have enough free disk space before you start the upgrade. Even if that didn't cause this problem, it's still something that needs to be taken care of. And then, if you get a Module Not Found message, look in your BackOffice directory first. Of course, when you do your upgrade, you won't have any of these problems, now will you…. will you… will you…