Comments on: PowerShell script to help uninstall SQL Server 2008 R2 Evaluation Edition

By: Rob Farley

Rob Farley — Tue, 12 Apr 2016 11:58:16 +0000

Yes, Eric. If you make a Unicode file, it won’t work. It must be ASCII / UTF8.

By: Eric

Eric — Tue, 12 Apr 2016 11:46:43 +0000

Hello i’ve the solution :
you need to encode the result file (uninstallR2.bat) in UTF8 without Bom
following a powershell code :
$Path ="D:\DBA\uninstallR2.bat"
$MyFile = Get-Content $Path
$Utf8NoBomEncoding = New-Object System.Text.UTF8Encoding($False)
[System.IO.File]::WriteAllLines($Path, $MyFile, $Utf8NoBomEncoding)
And you can execute :
## Execute command file
$Path ="D:\DBA\uninstallR2.bat"
pushd $Path
.\uninstallR2.bat
popd
Enjoy

By: Rob Farley

Rob Farley — Sat, 20 Feb 2016 22:30:07 +0000

No worries. Glad it helped.

By: Rockie

Rockie — Sat, 20 Feb 2016 21:24:16 +0000

Hi guy!
You are Great! 🙂 Thank You very much for script, helped a lot.
p.s.: I\d recomment to add "/quiet" on the end of msiexec command – it will avoid confirmations and dialogs
Best regards,
Gennady

By: Varun

Varun — Sat, 19 Jul 2014 00:16:57 +0000

To What THeo was facing with some strange characters. If you save the bat file in ASCII format you wont get that strange character.
Get-ChildItem HKLM:\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Uninstall |
select @{Name=’Guid’;Expression={$_.PSChildName}}, @{Name=’Disp’;Expression={($_.GetValue("DisplayName"))}} |
where-object {$_.Disp -ilike "*SQL*R2*"} |
where-object {$_.Guid -like ‘{*’} |
% {"rem " + $_.Disp; ‘msiexec /x "’ + $_.Guid + ‘"’; ”} | Out-File .\uninstallR2.bat -Encoding ascii

By: Ed

Ed — Fri, 21 Jun 2013 02:18:36 +0000

Brilliant, thanks! Service Pack 1 was not picked up by the script, and I am unable to uninstall it or a hot fix I had installed. Be sure to remove those first before uninstalling sql server.

By: Rob Farley

Rob Farley — Thu, 31 Jan 2013 13:33:00 +0000

It runs just fine on my machine as is.
Try changing directory one level at a time into HKLM:\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Uninstall to make sure you can. Then slowly add the rest of the script to see what fails.
Could be you don’t have enough privilege? You could try making sure you have admin rights escalated in your PowerShell window (ie, Run As Administrator).

By: Ross Gallagher

Ross Gallagher — Thu, 31 Jan 2013 01:01:45 +0000

Hi Rob,
I am trying to use your script to help me remove a SQL Server 2008 R2 installation but when I run it I get this message below:
Get-ChildItem : A parameter cannot be found that matches parameter name ‘System.Object[]’.
Should I be able to just run your script exactly the way you have written it ?
Thanks.

By: llyjak

llyjak — Fri, 19 Oct 2012 22:55:49 +0000

Thanks, you ‘ve saved lot of my time 🙂 Nice job !

By: Stef Locke

Stef Locke — Fri, 31 Aug 2012 17:03:15 +0000

I just used this to give my infrastructure guys an uninstall script for all my various bits of sql server lying around. This has saved me so much time and if they say it doesn’t work, then I’ll chuck it into notepad and save as ANSI. I’ve been looking for something like this for ages. Great work!