If you encounter the error “Could not find the Database Engine startup handle” when attempting to install SQL Server 2008 R2, the cause may not lie with SQL Server, but with WinZip. This document describes issues I encountered in attempts to install SQL Server 2008 R2 on a Windows 7 machine, and my conclusion that the issue lay with flawed setup files, as extracted from the downloaded SQL Server 2008 R2 Developer .iso file by the WinZip extraction utility.
John Hall has twenty five years of experience in large and small software organization ranging from project management to software architect and programmer in the energy, public sector, financial, imaging, and healthcare fields. He was chief architect of a high volume payment processing archive which won the Microsoft High Performance Computing Award and is one of the largest SQL databases in the world. He is currently specializing in Microsoft Business Intelligence Solutions with Mariner. For fun he bowls and plays in a band.
