Installing SQL Server 2014 on Windows 8.1 Update 1

Introduction

I ran into a problem installing SQL Server 2014 on my Windows 8.1 Update 1 box. It kept giving me this error:

“Could not find the Database Engine startup handle.”

After lots of searching and reading different recommendations I finally decided to do the following:

• Disable UAC
• Extract the ISO to a folder and run the setup.exe from there.
• Change the SQL Server Database Engine to LocalSystem.

After doing  that my setup was successful. I then launched SQL Server Configuration Manager and made sure that SQL Server was running as shown below:

Thanks for reading and I hope this helps!