I was checking the pending updates in one of my test VISTA machines and the SQL Server 2005 Service Pack 2 was still in the list. I tried to install it using Windows Update but it returned an error: Error code 2B22. The link Get Help didn’t bring any help as the error code was not in the list. So I googled for it. Surprisingly I get very few results and most of them were the same Microsoft forum post republished by others sites. The post was simply someone asking for help and a couple of ‘me too’ responses.

Anyway, I needed more info about the problem so I looked for a log in my system. I’ve founded it in C:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\90\Setup Bootstrap\LOG\Hotfix

The file you want to look at is Summary.txt which holds the log of the last update. You may see other files like Summary_0.txt, Summary_1.txt … Summary_N.txt. Those contain information about past updates. As you can see in the image, the installer was not able to start the service. (Note that the error number here is 11402; 2B22 in decimal). After checking the service properties, it turned out that it was configured to run under a user account which password had changed recently. I fixed the problem and run the update again.

Once more, the update didn’t succeed. This time the error code was 780. However, now I knew where to look to diagnose the problem: The service SQL Server VSS Writer (SQLWriter) was disabled. Changing the Start Up property to Manual did the trick. Finally the Service Pack 2 install succeeded.