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Installation of SQL 2005 on Windows 2003 Cluster fails with error "The drive specified cannot be used for program location. Program files must be installed on a valid local disk available on all cluster nodes"

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While installing SQL Server 2005 on a windows server 2003 cluster the installation fails. After you select the Components to Install and click next we get the following error:

Error Massage:

TITLE: Microsoft SQL Server Setup

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The drive specified cannot be used for program location. Program files must be installed on a valid local disk available on all cluster nodes. The valid values are

Cause of the issue:

The admin share for the servers was disabled. Admin shares are a pre-requisite for the Installation of clustered SQL instance. We manually created the admin shares for both the nodes and did a restart of both the nodes and setup failed in the same step. We checked and found that the admin shares were disabled. On every restart the admin shares were getting disabled.

Resolution:

We went to this registry key HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\LanmanServer\Parameters and checked the values of these keys AutoShareServer and AutoShareWks .

They were configured with a value data of 0, changed that value to 1. Now we did a restart and the admin shares were still there. We were able to complete the installation.

We have a KB article on how to enable admin shares https://support.microsoft.com/kb/245117

IMPORTANT: This resolution contains information about modifying the registry. Before you modify the registry, make sure to back it up and make sure that you understand how to restore the registry if a problem occurs. For information about how to back up, restore, and edit the registry, click the following article number to view the article in the Microsoft Knowledge Base:

256986 Description of the Microsoft Windows Registry

 

Ashwin Menon

SE, Microsoft SQL Server

Reviewed by,

Karthick Krishnamurthy
TL, Microsoft SQL Server