A failure was detected for a previous installation, patch, or repair during configuration for features

Recently I was trying to apply a security update for one of my SQL instance and I encountered the following error in my summary log

Note: For those who are not aware, summary.txt is located in C:Program FilesMicrosoft SQL Server100Setup BootstrapLog

A failure was detected for a previous installation, patch, or repair during configuration for features [SQL_Browser_Redist,]. In order to apply this patch package (KB2494088), you must resolve any issues with the previous operation that failed. View the summary.txt log to determine why the previous operation failed.

To my knowledge there was no previous failure of any patch or service pack or rtm installation so I wasn’t sure why I was receiving the above error message..

Also, I didn’t have previous summary logs for me to verify whether the component SQL_Browser_Redist failed during previous install.

So I was interested to find how is setup.exe detecting whether a particular component failed during previous install and my research showed me that it is following registry value using which setup.exe detects whether previous patch install has failed

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESOFTWAREMicrosoftMicrosoft SQL Server100ConfigurationState

In this registry location, all the components which were successfully installed have value of 1 while if any of the component failed to install it has a value of 2.

However in my case, my system was 64 bit and in the above path I couldn’t find the key for component SQL_Browser_Redist. However I found the key for SQL_Browser_Redist in the following path

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESOFTWAREWow6432NodeMicrosoftMicrosoft SQL Server100ConfigurationState

I changed the value of key SQL_Browser_Redist  to 1 and started the patch installation and install completed successfully.

The ideal solution for this issue would be to look at the summary log of previous installation and rectify the issue with the previous errors and run the setup again. However here I was almost certain that I didn’t had any known failure of previous patches and secondly I didn’t had the summary logs to verify the same and hence I had to use this tweak to start applying the security patch and it worked successfully for me.

Parikshit Savjani
Premier Field Engineer