When you run the SharePoint Products Configuration Wizard for the first time, you get the following error:

System.Data.SqlClient.SqlException: CREATE DATABASE permission denied in database ‘master’.

This means that the domain account you specified to connect to the SQL Server does not have permissions to create the SharePoint config database. So go to your SQL Server and add the dbcreator role to your SharePoint Service account.

Please don’t make the SharePoint Service account elevated to domain admin level in AD or SysAdmin in SQL Server! It’s not necessary!

• Error: Startup task doesn’t exist. This is not a continuation after a restart.
• Error: This file does not exist
• Error: The tool was unable to install Hotfix for Microsoft Windows (KB976462).

I searched the Web for the errors I got and it seem that a common recommendation is to simply run prerequisiteinstaller.exe from the command-line:

• Open up a command window
• Go to your SharePoint setup location (like D:\ if running from CD drive)
• Enter “prerequisiteinstaller.exe” and then press enter
• A GUI would popup but just go ahead and proceed. It should finish installation.
• Review the log file, located in %DEFAULTUSERPROFILE%\Temp and named PrerequisiteInstaller.[datetime].log. Make sure there are no errors on the latest log file.

Interesting issue we had to troubleshoot today. This issue is related to SharePoint 2007.  Say you have a sub-site in a SharePoint site collection (let’s call it “Subsite A”) and the user/admin changes the URL of the site to something malformed, what happens?

We start “Subsite A” like the following:

Then, we change the URL into something malformed (deliberately for this exercise). See the Web Site Address field below? We’re purposely putting in a bad value (the end-user accidentally did it in the real-world scenario).

After you click the Save button on the Title, Description, and Icon Settings Page, you get the following error on the browser:

This error (HTTP 500 Internal Server Error) means that the website you are visiting had a server problem which prevented the webpage from displaying.

Trying to access the site yields HTTP 500 error:

You think maybe you can rename using SharePoint Designer. But SP Designer throws you an error message instead:

Server error: The version of the Windows SharePoint Services running on the server is more recent than the version of the SharePoint Designer you are using. You need a more recent version of the SharePoint Designer.

But the SharePoint Designer error message is misleading–the SharePoint site is MOSS 2007. It’s the bad URL causing this.

You can fix this by using STSADM renameweb command. In the screenshot below, I rename the badly-formed URL to its original URL using STSADM renameWeb:

The site owner accidentally put in a bad URL and that is why we’re using STSADM to fix it. It’s hard to mess-up the site-collection URL. But if you need to change the URL of a site-collection, you can use STSADM renamesite.

For more details on how to use these commands, visit:

• How to use the new “renamesite” operation to change the URL of a host-named site collection in Windows SharePoint Services 3.0.
• Renameweb Stsadm operation (Windows SharePoint Services)