This is a repost of this in technet forums, which are maybe more appropriate for this question.
I suspect this is an issue because we hit the 50 instance max limit of SQL Server. At the limit it won't install more instances, naturally. However, it seems it won't UNinstall them either. That's worse.
It hangs at the "Select Features" dialogue when you hit next after selecting the SQL Engine for the instance.
I didn't find a lot of info about this. The most interesting hit was this: http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/sqlserver/en-US/24a1e5f3-25f3-48c8-973a-4c6a18578e42/trying-to-uninstall-1-of-50-sql-server-2008-r2-express-hangs-on-please-wait
It also suggest using setup.exe with some parameters to uninstall the instance, but I can't get it to do so without starting the GUI and into the normal uninstall which fails.
Elevation does nothing. Reboot doesn't help. Logs only say "canceled by user", because I have to kill it in the end. Nothing obvious prior to that point. Validations are all green.
The setup says it is SQL Server 2012 SP1 - all instances are at 11.0.2100.
Trying to do it the command line way:
> Setup.exe /Action=Uninstall /FEATURES=SQL /INSTANCENAME=SOMENAME /Q
The following error occurred:
SQL Server 2012 cannot add any more instances. To continue installing this instance, you must uninstall an existing instance.
Error result: -2146233079
Result facility code: 19
Result error code: 5385
Really? Is there such a horrible bug in the installer as cancel out of UNinstall an instance because you cannot "add more instances".
Does there exist a hotfix? Tool? How can this happen in v11 of SQL Server?
-@gomibushi