So after Paris it’s back to work again and this week I need to prep a VM for a customer project. I already received a clean Windows 2003 Machine and on Monday I installed SQL Server 2005 before I went. I should have seen this coming, but anyhow today I wanted to install a Mini-SAP 4.6D.
MiniSAP (now called MiniWAS) is available for Linux as a download but the Windows version is only distributed in the shop or as part of the ABAP Objects book (I hope the program manager who made that decision never crosses my way). Anyhow, I got the CDs somehow (don’t ask) and looked at the Documentation.doc file. (Actually I of course immediatelly clicked on setup.bat and bang it crashed, but doesn’t it sound calmer when I say I looked at the documentation first?).
Seems that I have versions of the CD that contain a production bug, so after doing some manually editing in the install files (as described in the documentation) I was ready to go. It tries to install MSDE on the machine, but that fails with an (‘Instance name not valid’) but I have a big SQL Server 2005 running on the machine, so I just commented out the MSDE install line in the setup.bat and it continued.
The first error I got was a collation problem. Having installed SQL Server 2005 with the default collation SAP expected it to be SQL_Latin1_General_Cp850_BIN.
Thankfully it was a clean sql server so I only needed to mount my SQL Server DVD again and run:
setup.exe /qb INSTANCENAME=MSSQLSERVER REINSTALL=SQL_Engine REBUILDDATABASE=1 SQLCOLLATION=SQL_Latin1_General_Cp850_BIN
(you can specify SAPWD if you are using mixed and not Windows Authentication). You will be prompted: You have chosen to re-install, and therefore overwrite the system databases. Are you sure you want to proceed? Yes! (Don’t do this on a live production server. Ever.)
Started setup again, and next I was presented with an error for a registry key it couldn’t find in ‘Software\Microsoft\MSSQLServer\MSSQLServer\Parameters’. I found the MSSQLServer node but had to manually create the Parameters node. And restarted setup.bat and this time it finished without problem! Hurray.
Next up was the GUI which the original setup tried installing but couldn’t locate the setup file. It’s in the MINIGUI folder. Once that is installed, just double click the ‘Start R3 MBS’ on the desktop, then fire up the GUI and follow the rest of the instructions in the documentation. Don’t forget to install the latest Kernel Patches from the SAP Site. Voila. Hope it helps.