Unable to login to SharePoint Central Administration Site during installation of SharePoint in Farm configuration

Unable to login to SharePoint Central Administration Site during installation of SharePoint in Farm configuration

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I am fairly new to SharePoint, but needed to set it up on my lab server. Since my lab server already had SQL Server installed I used Farm installation option. Also I used a dedicated Domain account to run SharePoint Application Pool on IIS. 

One of the issues that you may run into in this configuration is that fact that the account under which the SharePoint application pool is running needs write access to certain directories under c:\windows\Microsoft.NET\v.1.1.4322\Temporary ASP.NET Files\  (note that the version of .NET framework may vary on your server).  If the account under which your SharePoint pool is running does not have write access to this folder and its subfolders than during the initial configuration of the SharePoint you will not be able to login to the SharePoint Central Administration Site (you are being asked 3 times for login credentials and after 3rd time you get a generic ASP.NET exception message).

To further troubleshoot this issue you can edit the web.config under c:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\web server extension\60\template\admin\1033. Set the customErrors Mode to On. This will replace the generic ASP.NET exception message with a more detailed error output, which in my case pointed to the fact that the process could not write to the ASP.NET temporary folder (full path mentioned earlier). After giving the SharePoint modify permissions the temporary ASP.NET folder and it's subfolders I was able to continue with the setup.