Monday, January 22, 2007

Installing ADAM on Vista

Users running Vista have been disappointed when they downloaded ADAM SP1 and tried to install it only to receive this:

This unintuitive error is Vista's way of barfing on installation.  Luckily, there is a workaround (thanks to Dmitri G. and Lee Flight).  Here is what you have to do:

  1. Install ADAM on a non-Vista machine.  I used a Windows 2003 server VM to do this.
  2. Copy the %WINDIR%\ADAM folder that is created to your Vista machine to the same location.
  3. Create a new registry key called HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\ADAM_Shared
  4. Under this key, create a new Multi-String value called "SharedFolders"
  5. Now, run adaminstall.exe from your %WINDIR%\ADAM directory and follow the wizard.  Do not import any LDIF files.
  6. Finally, run ldifde.exe for each import you wanted to have in step #5.  The correct command line arguments to use are listed at the top of each .ldf file.

Admittedly, this is a bit of a pain.  It would be a whole lot better if Microsoft just updated the ADAM installer to support Vista.  However, if you want some ADAM love with Vista today, this is your only choice...

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