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While I was working on an SQL Server 2008 R2 Service Pack 3 uninstallation it failed with below errors. Warnings from several forums and blogs came back to my mind like ‘pray to god that your service pack uninstallation will never fail’ , like some old prophecy haunting me. Anyways the result was uninstallation failed and when I clicked on ‘Ignore’ it started progressing further but failed with another same kind of error, clicked on ‘ignore’ and successfully uninstallation failed to uninstall successfully.

To start with, how to uninstall a service pack of SQL Server 2008 R2.

Irrespective of any service pack the uninstallation steps remain same. Here I am uninstalling SP3 of SQL Server 2008 R2 version.

GO to Control Panel ==> Add/Remove Programs ==> View Installed Updates

Now Right click on Service Pack 3 for  and select ‘Uninstall’

That will take you to this window:

Select the features for which you want to uninstall SP3, ideally you need to select all the features:

  

After clicking on “Next” it will take you to ‘Files in Use’ window and once its done click on next

Here you will see ‘Ready to remove features’ window. Here verify all the features got selected and correct instance got selected and other parameters are selected correctly.

Now click on ‘Remove’ and this will start the uninstallation process. You will see the progress as below and even the uninstallation completes successfully if there are no issues found.

Coming to my case obviously it was looking for some disk like ‘Z:\x64\setup’ and obviously, there is no such disk in the server. I searched under 'Programs *' folders if there is any ‘setup’ folder under any of ‘x64’ SQL folders but I haven’t found any. There are different solutions suggested online but as a first step, I copied the setup files of the same version as my current instance which is SQL Server 2008 R2 to the server. Then I searched for the ‘\x64\setup’ and it was indeed there.

Now I started the uninstallation again and when I encountered the above error, this time, I clicked on ‘Browse’ in the error window and gave the path of ‘\x64\setup’ folder from the setup files I copied. After copying, I clicked on ‘ok’ and the uninstallation started progressing and I did the same for the second error as well.

This time, uninstallation completed successfully.

Thanks VV!!