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How-To Software Technical

Uninstall of SQL fails with error about RsFx Driver

I was working on uninstalling installations of SQL 2012 and SQL 2008 R2 to later do a clean install of SQL 2012. All seems to be going relatively smooth until I encountered the following message:

Warning 26003. Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2 Setup
Support Files cannot be uninstalled because the
following products are installed:
Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2 RsFx Driver

Understandable; So I will uninstall using Control Panel\Programs\Programs and Features (Add/Remove for the old school). However the item wasn’t listed. After searching on how to do this using the registry I found a simpler way, I am now calling it a clean and #jermsmit supported way to doing this.

Steps to correct this issue:

We need to obtain the product GUID from WMI using WMIC so that we can use the MSIEXEC /X {GUID} command to remove the software.

Open a command prompt as administrator and type: WMIC PRODUCT LIST to get a list of products and the GUID associated with them. I found using the following command works best: WMIC PRODUCT GET Caption, IdentifyingNumber > c:\info.txt 

Once you have the GUID of the software you want to uninstall you simply type: MSIEXEC /X {GUID}

Software is now uninstalled and you can proceed.

*note* the steps provided can be used for any software you are looking to uninstall that is not listed under Add/Remove programs. Just follow the steps as such:

  1. Get the product GUID from WMI (Win32_Product class)
  2. Find the GUID related to the product or products that the SQL error mentions
  3. Run MSIEXEC /X {GUID} for each of the products to uninstall them manually.

 

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