“Failed to find a cluster group that owned shared disk” SQL Server 2005 setup error

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I think it could be interesting to share this SQL Server 2005 setup error since the message written in the setup logs was not clearly exposing the root-cause of the issue.

In this case my customer was trying to update to Service Pack 3 (SP3) a SQL Server 2005 clustered instance. The error that we could see on the Hotfix.log SP3 setup log:

10/20/2009 12:05:18.655 MSP Error: 29527 The setup has encountered an unexpected error in datastore. The action is RestoreSetupParams. The error is : Source File Name: datastore\cachedpropertycollection.cpp
Compiler Timestamp: Mon Nov 17 17:05:55 2008
Function Name: CachedPropertyCollection::findProperty
Source Line Number: 130
----------------------------------------------------------
Failed to find property "OwningGroup" {"VirtualServerInfo", "", "CONTOSOSQL"} in cache
Source File Name: datastore\clusterinfocollector.cpp
Compiler Timestamp: Mon Nov 17 17:05:55 2008
Function Name: ClusterInfoCollector::collectClusterVSInfo
Source Line Number: 888
----------------------------------------------------------
Failed to detect VS info due to datastore exception.
Source File Name: datastore\clustergroupsproperties.cpp
Compiler Timestamp: Mon Nov 17 17:05:55 2008
Function Name: ClusterGroupScope.SharedDisks
Source Line Number: 56
----------------------------------------------------------
Failed to fin
10/20/2009 12:05:18.843 Attempting to continue the 32 bit ngen queue
10/20/2009 12:05:18.905 Attempting to continue the 64 bit ngen queue

Please, pay attention to the button of the log highlighted in blue color; as you can see the latest paragraph seems to be incomplete. You can find this situation with some error messages in setup log files and the best option it to look up the same error on the Application Event Log, where we will usually see the complete message; in our case this was the error:

Failed to find property "OwningGroup" {"VirtualServerInfo", "", "CENSVXISQL"} in cache
Source File Name: datastore\clusterinfocollector.cpp
Compiler Timestamp: Mon Nov 17 17:05:55 2008
Function Name: ClusterInfoCollector::collectClusterVSInfo
Source Line Number: 888
----------------------------------------------------------
Failed to detect VS info due to datastore exception.
Source File Name: datastore\clustergroupsproperties.cpp
Compiler Timestamp: Mon Nov 17 17:05:55 2008
Function Name: ClusterGroupScope.SharedDisks
Source Line Number: 56
----------------------------------------------------------
Failed to find a cluster group that owned shared disk: D:

Clearly, the next step was to check what was wrong with server’s D: drive. In our case this drive was a clustered shared disk, not a local one and it was part of the SQL Server 2005 cluster group. At first sight, everything was fine with this resource, but looking in more detail into the cluster configuration we could see what was wrong:

Resource:
---------
Disk D: { Physical Disk }
+(1)-----Depends On-> SQL Server Fulltext { Generic Service }

 

For some reason, the SQL Server Fulltext Search service (FTS) was configured as a dependency for "Disk D:" resource. This is not correct, as you can verify on one of my previous post and in Microsoft Knowledge Base article KB835185, Failover cluster resource dependencies in SQL Server:

The SQL IP address resource and the physical disk resources do not depend on any resources

After eliminating this dependency on cluster resource "Disk D:" we were able to successfully install SQL Server 2005 SP3.