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Hi,

I spent some time to install SQL Server Express, here are my findings, the my save some work for others.

- I installed the server as part of the prerequisites

- you will need more than 256 of physical RAM (I succeeded with 512 MB), despite the MS documentation saying that you need only 192 MB. In my case I wanted to have a silent install und the server setup was simply aborted (the rest of the setup continued).
When I installed by hand the normal SQLEXPR-installer put out warning ("Hardware requirements not met") but I could continue.
Attention: if this happens the 'SQL Native Client' is already installed and will prohibit a subsequent installation of the server; you have to uninstall this first manually.

- you will find detailed logs of the setup in %ProgramFiles%\Microsoft SQL Server\90\Setup Bootstrap\LOG\
Read the Summary.txt first. Then look in the specific log file of the component under
%ProgramFiles%\Microsoft SQL Server\90\Setup Bootstrap\LOG\Files
(this described in the SQL Server 2005 doc)

- the silent install needs following settings:
-- Command line: -q /norebootchk /qn (as ssen in this forum)
-- Bootstrapper UI/UI level: Basic UI and progress (if you choose 'Silent install (no UI)' here, you will receive no UI and the installation takes a while longer than a normal user is waiting)

- after the installation I had the setup run a script to define the database and fill it with data by using SQLCMD (search in this forum to find something on it).

Greetings
Stefan Hackenthal
aldebaran.de