I'm installing SQL Server 2022 and encountering this error, can anyone help me? I use Window 11. Specifically, the error I encountered is as follows: "exit code(decimal):-2147467259 error description: The system cannot find the path specified"

Question

Answer 1

There are no end of exceptions in the log file. It seems that Setup is able to recover from all of them but the last. As for that error, it is one I have seen when trying to help other users, but I have never been able to understand what is going on. But my belief is that this is an error that occurs mainly in the situation when a user tried to install SQL Server and it failed with some error. The user might have tried some random cleanup and made renewed attempts. Because the cleanup was incomplete, Setup now fails with another error than it did originally.

Here is a link to an article that can help you to clean up properly: https://www.sql-easy.com/learn/how-to-uninstall-sql-server/. I have not tried it myself, but I learnt about it from a user who was in a similar situation as yours, and who was able to install SQL Server successfully after following the article.

Since you are on Windows 11, be sure to check out this article before you try again. It discusses a known issue where Windows 11 reports a disk-sector size that SQL Server chokes on. This could be the cause for your original failure. Check out this article, and if needed apply the workarounds it proposes.

If Setup still fails after these steps, I would recommend that you try to install SQL Server on a virtual machine instead. If you have not worked with virtual machines before that is a bit of a hurdle, but virtual machines is a technology that is worthwhile to master on its own.