I got bitten by this one for the second time today until I realised I’d seen it before. The symptoms are a failure to complete the installation of the Data Warehouse Configuration step during a System Center Operations Manager 2012 SP1 installation which causes a roll back of the whole install like so:

The setup.log file also shows the following:

CREATE DATABASE failed. Some file names listed could not be created.

Essentially this seems to be a ‘quirk’ in the installer which doesn’t generate the SQL data file and log file name and simply adds .mdf and .ldf onto the end of the path that is pulled through from the SQL detection. The easy workaround for it is to add a filename (minus the extension) onto the end of your path like so:

This will then create the SQL data and log file correctly as OperationsManagerDW.mdf and OperationsManagerDW.ldf in the relevant locations.

Big credit to Matt Boudro from Concurrency for the original blog posting which helped me the first time I saw it: http://blog.concurrency.com/infrastructure/scom-2012-sp1-installation-error/