Microsoft Sql Server 2012 Setup Attempted To Perform An Unauthorized Operation

I am trying to install SQL Server 2012 Developer edition on my laptop which had it working previously. My laptop was running low on disk space and I had to uninstall it earlier. It

Solution 1:

After reading through many more articles and posts online, I could not get it working with any of those options. I have seen similar comments from other people who were not satisfied with those answers either. Hence I can definitely say that there is an inherent problem somewhere causing you a lot of pain if you were to have a corrupt or bad SQL Server Developer/Express installation in the first place. For now, I am satisfied with the following and thought of posting it here in case it helps someone. Its a bit weird that after changing the SQL Server installation path to a different folder (in my case I changed it to "D:\SQL\Microsoft SQL Server") the Database engine installs without any issues.

Couple of points to remember if you were to encounter a similar issue: 1. If you were to see an "unauthorized operation" or similar error during installation, please run the tool ProcessMonitor (Sysinternal/Microsoft) and inspect the trace after filtering for the SQL Server Engine installer process. Unauthorized operation while installing SQL Server 2012 Express/Developer 2. I have seen that the service account that the "SQL Server Agent" and the "SQL Server Database engine" uses is probably created on the fly and this may not have enough access rights to the registry. I am not very sure on this one, however its worth a look at changing it to some other account (say LocalService) if nothing helps.

3. In the development environment, You could try giving full permission to the registry key in question. In my case it was being owned by the "System" account and could not grant permissions easily. I rebooted Windows 10 into safe mode and gave the required permissions and then rebooted back to the normal mode.

Registry Permissions, user accounts