I had really hard time installing the final version of Microsoft SQL Server 2014 developer edition. The setup was always complaining with the error: "Could not find the Database Engine startup handle, error 0x851A0019".

Just for the record, my setup is Windows 8.1 Pro and the SQL 2014 was never installed on this computer (except the CTP2 in a VM which doesn’t really count!).

Using my both major search engines (because they often return different results), I have tried all kind of tricks like:

• Install only the database engine (instead of almost all options)
• Disable the firewall
• Disable the anti-virus
• Run as administrator
• Check the permissions
• Use a checksum verifier (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/841290/en-us) to ensure my file downloaded from MSDN was not corrupted
• Tried Virtual CloneDrive (http://www.slysoft.com/en/virtual-clonedrive.html) to mount the ISO file as a drive
• Use WinZip instead of WinRar to decompress the ISO file

After all these tries (many hours!!!), I have finally been able to install. What I have done? I simply uninstalled SQL Server 2012 and restarted the setup of SQL Server 2014 and it installed correctly!

The only difference I can see in my case is that without SQL Server 2012 (which was the default instance), I didn’t have to install SQL Server 2014 as a named instance.