How hard can it be to uninstall SQL Server from Windows Server 2008 R2 core?
It should be straight forward but first I had to find the magic uninstall command - setup.exe which is located in the Setup Bootstrap\SQLServer2012 folder in the folder that SQL server 2012 was installed in to in the first place. On my machine this is C:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\110\Setup Bootstrap\SQLServer2012.
It took me some time but eventually I found the following command worked
setup /action=uninstall /FEATURES=SQL,Tools,RS,AS,IS /INSTANCENAME=MSSQLSERVER /UIMODE=EnableUIOnServerCore.
I tried using /QS instead of /UIMODE=EnableUIOnServerCore but it couldn't find any features to uninstall!
It also allowed me to select all of the components including the shared components - which is the only way I found to remove all of them apart from the native client.
To remove the Native Client use:msiexec /uninstall {49D665A2-4C2A-476E-9AB8-FCC425F526FC}
It does leave a few log files and empty directories floating around but they are easily cleaned up.
