Corey Roth [MVP]

This is kind of a weird issue and I ran into it the last two times I setup a MOSS virtual machine, so I thought I would take a moment to tell about it today.  I am a Windows Server 2008 virtual machine.  This server is a DC and also has SQL Server 2008 installed.  In my particular case I have the setup files for MOSS extracted onto a folder on my external hard drive so that I can do a slipstream install of SP1 and the Infrastructure Update.  To access the files I am using Virtual PC’s Share Folder feature to provide access to the install files inside the virtual machine. 

I created a setup account for MOSS to do the install since that seems to be a best practice.  This account has administrator privileges.  Here is where the issue comes in.  When I login with my setup account and try to run setup.exe for MOSS, I get the following error.

Setup.exe.  The Parameter is Incorrect.

In attempting to troubleshoot the issue, I noticed that if I ran it with the actual administrator account, everything works fine.  However, this is not the account I wanted to install on.  No matter what I could do, I could not get setup to run as a shared folder.  Instead, what I ended up having to do was map a folder over the network to the host machine and install the files that way.  Not sure what would cause this, but I assume it has something to do with Virtual PC.  Anyhow, if you run into this issue, it’s easy to work around.