This week, work gave me a new laptop, an IBM ThinkPad P4 2.4 Ghz. It is freekin huge. I mean, it is bigger than my old laptop that is 3 years old. Personally I don’t care how big a laptop is, cause I don’t do a whole lot of traveling. The good news is the laptop it super fast compared to my old one. I’m still getting used to the keyboard so if my typing is off in this post you’ll know why.
I was installing the OS and software I needed – Windows 2003 Server, SQL Server 2000, and Studio .Net 2003, etc. When I rebooted, I noticed that a service was not starting correctly. I checked the event log which said that the Machine Debug Manager could not start because the path could not be found. WTF? I just installed that with Studio. So I did a search for the EXE. Guess where it was found? My work network drive. How in God’s name did that happen? It turns out that when Studio .Net installed, it put all of the files that should have gone in c:\program files\common files and c:\program files\windows in my network drive. When the machine was booting, it did not have access to this drive and the OS could not start the services Studio installed there.
I tried uninstalling Studio.Net, but no luck. Everything was still left there. Also, I could not tell Studio to change where it was installing these files.
After about 4 hours of troubleshooting this problem, I gave up. I put the Windows 2003 Server disk back in the cd-rom, rebooted and formatted the drive again, starting from scratch. Luckily I had not installed that much software yet. This time I installed everything as the administrator of the local machine before I logged in as myself. I was not going to let Studio install anything on my network drive. Pain in the ASS.
Thanks for letting me vent after a frustrating day of setting up my new laptop.
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