Upgrading SQL Server 2008 to SP1 should not require a blog post. Any upgrade should be a matter of clicking Next, Next, Next, Finish; but alas, SQL Server SP1 update thinks otherwise. This is what I’ve been getting when trying to run the SP1 update for an x64 instance from the network:

In order to fix this error, I followed these steps:

1. Copied the SQLServer2008SP1-KB968369-x64-ENU.exe file to my documents folder
2. Open an administrator command prompt
3. Change dir to “My Documents” folder
4. Extract the files by typing “SQLServer2008SP1-KB968369-x64-ENU.exe /extract”
5. You will be prompted to select a folder to extract, I selected C:\SQL-2008-SP1
6. Launch the file Setup.exe as administrator from the folder you specified in the previous step
7. No more “Invoke or BeginInvoke cannot be called on a control until the window handle has been created” errors.

The Microsoft Assessment and Planning Toolkit (amongst other things) lets you find out information about your current server infrastructure to see which are machines that are virtualization candidates. The software uses SQL to store the information it gathers throughout the process, and it also offers a way to export this info but is not very well documented.

If you look into the following folder:

C:\Program Files\Microsoft Assessment and Planning Toolkit\Help\Support Files

You will find various scripts to backup and restore the MAPS database. However, when you run BackupAllDB.cmd it will fail:

As the error implies, it cannot find “Backupall.sql” which is in the same folder as the script. This happens because the script runs under c:\windows\system32\cmd.exe and is looking for the SQL script in that directory (great job testing this feature, BTW)

To fix this, just copy the whole Support Files folder to your documents, open the BackupAllDB.cmd script and enter the complete path to the BackupAll.sql file, in my case:

osql -E -S %computername%\MAPS -E -i “C:\Users\v-csabor\Documents\Support Files\BackupAll.sql”

Run the modified script once again and it will backup your files…in the following directory:

C:\Windows\System32\DBBACKUP\

Which is the last place on earth you would look for it.