My job revolves around troubleshooting and fixing the broken thing. Here is one of the situation which I ran into recently and was unable to find solution on internet. It my responsibility to provide self-assist option to the SQL community so that they can find the problem and fix by themselves.

I was trying to install SQL Server 2012 on a 2 nodes Windows cluster. When I tried installing it, it failed with error in subject line. At this first look it sounds like some COM+ error but as always, setup logs are my first place to find the errors. Here is the MSDN link which explains the various files created by setup

https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms143702(v=sql.110).aspx (View and Read SQL Server Setup Log Files)

The information which I saw in setup logs was pretty interesting. In particular, I looked into Detail.txt file which is the parent file of all MSI logs. (I have removed date and time for better reading)

Error: Action "Microsoft.SqlServer.Configuration.SetupExtension.ValidateFeatureSettingsAction" threw an exception during execution.
Microsoft.SqlServer.Setup.Chainer.Workflow.ActionExecutionException: Element not found. (Exception from HRESULT: 0x80070490) —> System.Runtime.InteropServices.COMException (0x80070490): Element not found. (Exception from HRESULT: 0x80070490)
   at Microsoft.SqlServer.Interop.MSClusterLib.ISClusResource.get_Disk()
   at Microsoft.SqlServer.Configuration.Cluster.ClusterPhysicalDisk.get_Partitions()
   at Microsoft.SqlServer.Configuration.ClusterConfiguration.ClusterDiskPublicConfigObject.IsPathOnSharedDisk(String path)
   at Microsoft.SqlServer.Configuration.SetupExtension.SlpInputSettings.ValidateNotOnSharedDisk(ValidationState vs, String directoryName, String bindingKey, String errorMessage)
   at Microsoft.SqlServer.Configuration.SetupExtension.SlpInputSettings.Validate_InstallSharedDir(ValidationState vs)
   at Microsoft.SqlServer.Configuration.SetupExtension.SlpInputSettings.ValidateSettings()
   at Microsoft.SqlServer.Configuration.SetupExtension.ValidateFeatureSettingsAction.ExecuteAction(String actionId)
   at Microsoft.SqlServer.Chainer.Infrastructure.Action.Execute(String actionId, TextWriter errorStream)
   at Microsoft.SqlServer.Setup.Chainer.Workflow.ActionInvocation.ExecuteActionHelper(TextWriter statusStream, ISequencedAction actionToRun)

The stack goes from bottom to Top. If we read the function calls made, anyone can conclude that there is something happening with cluster disks. That’s a good hint. So, I went back to failover cluster manager and looked into Disks under “Storage”. There was a disk which was in failed state. I was not able to bring this online and that’s THE problem! SQL Setup would enumerate the disks to find eligible disks which can be used and it’s not able to find details about that disk. Here was the error when I attempted to bring it online.

The resource ‘Cluster Disk 1’ did not come online.
The desired state change for ‘Cluster Disk 1’ did not occur before the timeout expired.

I realized that I have played with iSCSI and messed up the disk which was presented.

Solution: Delete the disks which are not able to come online under “Storage > Disks” or “Available Storage” in failover cluster manager interface.

Hope this helps.