Installing Microsoft’s Data Protection Manager seemed easy enough. Install the prerequisites and run the installer. I have to assume that this would have worked the first time had I not missed the ‘HTTP Referrer’ check box when installing IIS on Windows Server 2008. As a result of missing the HTTP Referrer prerequisite, DPM fails – without providing accurate details, saying that it could not install SQL Server Express 2005. Actually, it couldn’t install SRS. The installer says that it’s rolling back the SQL installation, but this wasn’t truly the case. If you reach this point, you’re in trouble.
I added the HTTP Refferer feature to IIS and thought I was all set to reinstall. Well, a day later and numerous unistall/reinstall/uninstall/reinstall attempts later – I finally found the solution(s).
Even though we were starting from scratch before each attempt by uninstalling .Net and IIS, the registry settings were not being removed. This is what we had to do before getting DPM installed:
Success! And I must say that DPM has thus far proved to be a fantastic backup solution. We will definitely continue to recommend this product for clients needing a new or updated backup solution.
Subsequent installation attempts have been seamless. This goes to show how important a seemingly minor prerequisite can be. The hope would be that if the prerequisite wasn’t met, then you’d receive an error that details the issue; allowing you to fix it and run the installer again. Don’t trust this assumption and be very careful installing the prerequisite software PRIOR to inserting the DPM disk.
