If you have installed SQL Server Denali CTP3, whether on a cluster or standalone, you may have noticed this brand new dialog during installation:

The skip GUI does not work very well to be honest with you. I find it still tries and ultimately fails even if you tell it to skip the check or unselect Include SQL Server product updates. Because of that, the GUI right now for me is a longer process than it needs to be. I prefer to do command line installations overall, but do GUI as well. Especially since Denali is CTP, I want to test as many code paths as possible. What can I say? I never got rid of the old QA engineer/tester in me.

If you are doing command line or file-based scripted installs, there is good news. There is a switch/command for SQL Server Denali that will allow you to completely skip the update check and it does work. The switch is UPDATEENABLED. Set it to false and Setup will not check for updates online. This is especially helpful for installations that will not have Internet access.

The syntax would look like this:
Command Line (as part of a bigger string of commands)
[cc]/UPDATEENABLED=”FALSE”[/cc]

In a file (on its own line)
[cc]UPDATEENABLED=”FALSE”[/cc]

In the log file, you will see this:
[cc width=”700″]
(04) 2011-07-19 20:29:17 Slp: ———————————————————————-
(04) 2011-07-19 20:29:17 Slp: Running Action: SearchUpdatesAction
(04) 2011-07-19 20:29:17 Slp: Skipping update search
(04) 2011-07-19 20:29:17 Slp: Completed Action: SearchUpdatesAction, returned True
(04) 2011-07-19 20:29:17 Slp: ———————————————————————-
[/cc]

Of course, if you want to check for updates, don’t add this line which means the default value of TRUE is set.

Have fun with command line installations!