For the last few weeks, on and off, I have been experimenting with setting up SharePoint 2013 Enterprise in order to explore its Business Intelligence features. Maybe you can just read about it and understand, but I need to try things.

After quite a few mistakes, I did manage to more or less install everything. At that point, though, I wasn’t too sure about the general integrity of the SharePoint farm — not after I had installed and uninstalled so many of its features while I was learning how things worked and what the various components actually did. So I decided to uninstall everything but the prerequisites and start over. There are actually not very many installation steps for a simple BI-oriented configuration, so why not?

To make a long story short, much of the BI support is installed by a tool called “SQL Server 2012 PowerPivot for SharePoint 2013,” which I had used as part of the original configuration process. Its ‘uninstall’ mode does not work right.

If you run into anything like this — in particular “Cannot create the service instance because the parent Service does not exist” errors — some very useful information can be found here.

While my scenario was different (I did not have a prior earlier version installed, so there were no leftover registry keys), many of the steps detailed at the above link were applicable. In particular, I had to fix the problems, uninstall, re-install, uninstall, and re-install again. I also found that the option to create a site collection using the tool didn’t work. I had to do that using Central Administration.

I don’t know if it is actually working yet or not, but at least I seem to be making progress again.