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...

January 22, 2007  # Tracked by:
"How to install ADAM on Vista?" (Tomek's DS World) [Trackback]
"ADAM on Vista Update" (Extemporaneous Mumblings) [Trackback]