Problems Installing PostgreSQL 9.2

Question

I\'ve been trying to install the 64bit version of PostgreSQL 9.2 for Windows on my machine (Windows 7 64bit) and get this error:

The environment variable COMPS

Answer 1

I'm running Windows Server 2003 R2, and I have been unable to resolve this problem with the installer, so I resorted to using the binary PostgreSQL package. Hopefully this will be an alternative for others who do not want to perform an OS reinstall.

First, some background (hopefully useful to the developers)

It started out with the postgres service failing to start (the server had been running reliably for over a year). I assumed it was a corrupted PostgreSQL installation, so I uninstalled and attempted to reinstall. I encountered the following error:

There has been an error.
The environment variable COMSPEC does not seem to point to the cmd.exe or there is a trailing semicolon present.
Please fix this variable and restart installation.

However, the COMSPEC variable is set properly, verified with:

echo %COMSPEC%
C:\WINDOWS\system32\cmd.exe

and:

"%COMSPEC%" /C "echo test ok"
test ok

Since this is Windows Server 2003, there is no UCA wrapper around the Administrator account, so that is not causing the problem.

Manual Installation

NET USER postgres /ADD

C:\pgsql\bin\initdb.exe -U postgres -A password -E utf8 -W -D C:\pgsql\data

runas /user:postgres "C:\pgsql\bin\pg_ctl -D C:/pgsql/data -l C:/pgsql/logfile.txt start"