I recently installed the 4.6D Mini Basis system for the first time. I immediately ran into the problem that I already had the Developer Edition of SQL Server installed (don't ask) and the Mini Basis installation likes to install MSDE. To avoid this choose "Resume Installation" from the setup page. DO NOT choose "Start Installation". Just trust me on that or read the FAQ on the CD, either way... Now the installation may still fail, especially if you just took the defulats in your installation of SQL Server. No problem. Open up the file C:\WINNT\TEMP\mbsinst\MBS.R3S and make the following changes to these keys.
COLLATION=SQL_Latin1_General_CP1_CI_AS
SORTORDER=Bin_iso_1
CHARSET=iso_1
Now restart the installation using "Resume Installation" again and it should complete. You should run transaction SGEN to compile the system as soon as you login, just be sure you don't plan on using it for a while. I haven't actually done this yet as it is on my laptop of rather limited resources. Perhaps I'll try this tonight and post tomorrow how long it took. Or maybe I won't since I only have 256MB on this machine so that would be a rather unfair statistic to post.
