Rajeev Pentyala – Technical Blog on Power Platform, Azure and AI

I was getting below error during the SQL server 2017 installation.

VS Shell installation has failed with exit code 1638

Reason:

• Exit code 1638 denotes “Another version of this program is already installed”.
• In my case, I already had Visual Studio 2017 installed on my machine and there was conflict due to “Microsoft Visual C++ 2017 Redistributable” components which got installed with Visual Studio 2017.

Fix:

This issue was annoying and had to spend couple hours to find the actual reason and fix. Below fix worked in my case.

• Uninstall Visual Studio 2017
• Go to Control Panel and uninstall below ‘Microsoft Visual C++ 2017 Redistributable‘ components

• Restart the machine
• Try installing SQL Server
• Proceed with Visual Studio 2017 installation

🙂