SQL Express installation fails. Getting Exit code (Decimal): -2068052294 the setup failed

Question

I am using a brand new laptop that I just bought a few months ago. It is a Windows laptop 7. I tried to download SLQ Express a few times. The first few times I tried, I thought the program failed because of the firewall, but after I turned it off, the summary said it failed because I need to uninstall and reinstall everything. I then spent a few hours uninstalling everything that said SQL from my computer with "Add or Remove Programs". At this point I reset the computer, made sure the firewall was down, and tried to download SLQ Express again. Everything seemed like it was going to work, it even opened up a cmd window in the middle of it installing that mentioned SQL and said it was successful. But once the installation finished, the cmd window didn't say the same thing anymore and the installation window said there was a problem with the Windows Installer package and that I should contact "support personnel or package vendor". What am I supposed to do to fix this?Screenshot 2025-03-09 121220.png Screenshot 2025-03-09 121828.png Detail.txt Summary_Caleb-Wave_20250309_120630.txt

Answer 1

First things first: what hardware do you have? If you have an ARM processor, beware that SQL Server does not support ARM. The rest of the answer assumes that you have a regular x64 processor.

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.

If you are on Windows 11, be sure to read the article Troubleshoot errors related to system disk sector size greater than 4 KB 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 you make a new attempt after cleanup, and it still fails, you find log files in C:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\160\Setup Bootstrap\Log with one folder per attempt. The files of most interest are summary.txt, detail.txt and any file with ERRORLOG in the name. (The latter only appears if Setup came as far as trying to start SQL Server). Feel free to attach these to the thread here.