In the absence of a dedicated SQL DBA at the place where I work, I take care of the SQL Servers too. (No comment.)
One of the passive nodes of a SQL Server 2005 cluster had died a sudden death (hard drive and RAID failed under mysterious circumstances) which necessitated a total rebuild of the failed node.
So I went ahead and evicted passive node from the Cluster Administrator on the surviving active node. After the server rebuild was over, I configured Windows clustering on the second node using Cluster Administrator. Next, I started setup on the active node (from Control Panel –> Add/Remove Programs –> SQL Server 2005 –> Change).
I reached the point in the setup wizard where I choose to add a node to the existing virtual server/cluster. After a while I get the following error message:
Setup failed to start on the remote machine. Check the Task scheduler event log on the remote machine.
Upon checking the Task Scheduler event log on the node being rebuilt, I found this:
"SQL Server Remote Setup .job" (setup.exe) 9/18/2008 11:36:24 PM ** ERROR **
Unable to start task.
The specific error is:
0x80070005: Access is denied.
Try using the Task page Browse button to locate the application.
Now that’s very helpful, isn’t it?
A few minutes of head-scratching and web-searching yielded what I was missing – I was working on the servers connected via Remote Desktop! For the installation to start successfully on the remote (new) node, it should not have any active remote desktop sessions on it. I went ahead and closed all RDP sessions on the new node being rebuilt using Task Manager (Users tab) and also logged off the session that I was connected to.
Another retry from the first node, and setup now progressed without any errors.