Issue Resolution Journey during SharePoint 2010 Installation on Windows 7

While Installing SharePoint Foundation 2010, I encountered a failed installation error and it pointed me out to go through the log files.

While having a look at the log files, I landed on a file at this location C:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\100\Setup Bootstrap\Log\Summary.txt

When I scrolled towards the end of the file, the below InnerException was displayed.

Inner exception type: Microsoft.SqlServer.Configuration.SqlEngine.ValidationException
        Message: 
                The system database file master.mdf already exists in C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extensions\14\Data\MSSQL10.SHAREPOINT\MSSQL\DATA.

Towards resolving the issue, I renamed this file -> un-installed SharePoint Foundation 2010 and tried installing again. This time I hit another error quite similar to the above but with one exception, "the file name this time was master.ldf"

Inner exception type: Microsoft.SqlServer.Configuration.SqlEngine.ValidationException
        Message: 
                The system database file master.ldf already exists in C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extensions\14\Data\MSSQL10.SHAREPOINT\MSSQL\DATA.

By this I understood that it would do this for all the other system databases available in this folder.

I went one folder up to ..\MSSQL and renamed the folder DATA -> un-installed SharePoint Foundation 2010 and re-installed again. Guess what ....... I was in smiles.

SharePoint created another folder called DATA and created the database and log files a-fresh again.

Quite straight forward, but worth taking a space on my blog. Hope it helps!!