FIX for SQL cluster instance install error: “There was an unexpected failure during the setup wizard. The service cannot be started, either because it is disabled, or because it has no enabled devices associated with it”

I received the following generic popup message when installing a new instance on SQL 2005 SP3 cluster running on Windows Server 2003 R2: 

There was an unexpected failure during the setup wizard.  The service cannot be started, either because it is disabled, or because it has no enabled devices associated with it.

 

The active node’s system and application event logs didn’t even show any services trying to start.  The SQL setup log wasn’t terribly helpful either.  The error was:

 

Error: Action “OpenPipeAction” failed during execution.

I found that after I canceled the failed installation, more information was written to the setup log.  That’s when I found these messages:

Error: Action “RunRemoteSetupAction” failed during execution.  Error information reported during run:

Attempting to determine log files for remote install.

Connection to remote computer’s scheduler service.

Error: SetTargetComputer on \\NODE2 failed with

Unable to start service (1058)

WinException while starting remote setup.

        Error Code: 0×80070422 (1058)

Windows Error Text: The service cannot be started, either because it is disabled or because it has no enabled devices associated with it.

I saw that the Task Scheduler was disabled on NODE2 (per our build standard).  I started the service, and the SQL instance installation completed successfully.

Fix: SQL Configuration Manager Connection to target machine could not be made in a timely fashion

Things didn’t go too smoothly yesterday when I was trying to reconfigure our SQL 2005 cluster and it’s database locations.  At one point I couldn’t even get SQL Configuration Manager to start up.  At various times I received both of the following errors.

The request failed or the service did not respond in a timely fashion. Consult the event log or other applicable error logs for details.  

Connection to target machine could not be made in a timely fasion.

 

Luckily, the fix was pretty easy.  Just launch services.msc and restart the Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI) service, SQL Configuration Manager should start up for you.