A strange SQL installation error with even a stranger solution

This week I was installing  SQL Server 2008 R2 Developer onto a new Dev server and everything was going fine until it got to about 70% complete when I received this error

Could not find the Database Engine startup handle

We tried installing on several other servers with the same result however our SQL Server Standard install worked fine.

After a bit of digging the solution is more bizarre than the error.

We had unzipped the ISO image to its constituent folders using WinZip.

The recommended solution was to unzip the ISO image using WinRAR instead.

We did this and the installation now works perfectly.

For the latest SQL Server 2012 training courses visit Learningtree.co.uk or learningtree.com