blog.jemm.net

Note: This is a repost from an another blog of mine that was located at the SharePoint Blogs. It recently had a huge hardware failure and many blogs got lost. Since I didn’t have much posts there, I’ll just repost this most popular/useful entry here for future reference.

I tried to install WSS v3 and for some reason I didn’t choose the Advanced / Web Fronted-setup in the beginning so the installer installed the SQL Server 2005 Embedded Edition. I wanted to use an existing instance of SQL Server 2005 so I had to uninstall the WSS v3 and the SQL Server EE before reinstalling.

The problem is that you can’t uninstall the SQL Server 2005 EE from the Control Panel, but it is a hidden instance. Fortunately there is a solution, which I found with a simple search (source link is dead, so I removed it):

To uninstall SSEE:
Start Registry Editor, and then locate the following registry key: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Uninstall

In the left pane, click each GUID.
For each GUID that you click, look for a display name in the right pane that matches “Microsoft SQL 2005 Embedded Edition…”.

When you see a display name that matches the name, copy the value of the Key named “UninstallString”
Open a Command-Window (Start->run->cmd)
Paste the Copied string.
Append “CALLERID=OCSETUP.EXE” eg “MsiExec.exe /X{BDD79957-5801-4A2D-B09E-852E7FA64D01} CALLERID=OCSETUP.EXE”

There you go
Don’t forget to reboot.
Hope that helps
Patrick

Yes, it helped. Thanks, Patrick