Installing ColdFusion 9 64-but on Windows 7 64-bit Experience

This weekend I got me a new laptop from Dell (Studio 15). I got it with 4 GB RAM (to me it has become a minumum now) which naturally meant going with a 64-bit OS. So, I now had this nice new laptop with Windows 7 x64 and once I was done cleaning out the bloatware, it was time to install ColdFusion. It turned out to be quite an experience and took much longer then I anticipated. But first, lets get one thing straight here, Adobe doesn't really provide any documentation on what you need to do to install CF properly on IIS 7.5. There is no, "verify these windows component are installed" document or screen. In any case, I had installed ColdFusion 9 on Windows 32-bit succesfully, and needless to say I felt (over)confident that I could do the same for Windows 7 64-bit.

I started out by configuring Windows have the IIS6 modules installed, I knew I had to do that. Then I ran the ColdFusion 9 install, no errors, got to the end, "Press OK to start CF Admin", did that. The CF Admin screen came up and did not work. IIS 7 told me about missing extension configuration. I realized at that point something was missed in my IIS reconfiguration, and it turned out it was the ISAPI Extensions under World Wide Web Services options, so I turned all those things on, Windows reconfigured IIS for me. I opened IIS, saw tha the ISAPI extensions and filters were not installed. Ready to go right? Wrong.

Still could not get to CF Admin. Ok, lets uninstall and install CF9 I thought, since now IIS has everything it needs for proper configuration. So I did that, uninstall then install and once again pressed "OK" at the end. Out comes the CF Admin page, "Click here" to continue configuration. Yay, victory was my first though. But then I noticed, something was not right. There was no Adobe logo, no images were showing up. Doesn't matter, I was able to open a .cfm page, so I continued with the configuration and then was logged into the Admin. Still no images. By the way, the Admin looks really bad if you can't see images. So, I closed the browser and opened a new IE window and went to //localhost/cfide/administraor/ and IIS 7 gives me an Error!! But thats where the CF Admin is located, but apparently IIS can't handle the request properly.

Sigh, I did some googling. Verified that the ISAPI handlers for .cfm extensions were pointing to the right DLL. Someone suggested uninstalling CF, deleting all CF directories and installing again. So I dd that, but same error again. Still can't see images in CF Admin. Frustrating, already installed CF9 3 times. Verified IIS setup again, all looks good there. I uninstall CF9 again, restart computer, delete directories, install CF9 again and same issue again. At that point, google had helped me as much as it can. I try to use the server configuration tool but I can't remove the current flawed IIS configuration from it (some error about not able to remove things).

Decide it time to start from scratch. So, I uninstall CF9, delete CF directories, restart computer. Uninstall IIS7 from windows, restart computer. Then reinstall IIS7 and restart computer. Then reinstall CF9 and Victory!! Everything works properly. Apparently, installing the ISAP Extensions after installing CF9 screwed up the installs and configurations in IIS. So, well, it worked now. Logged into CF Admin, //localhost/cfide/administrator/ resolved properly.

But that was not the End of the Story.

Apparently, setting up a MS Access Datasource on Windows 64-bit is another issue faced by various users. You would get an error about DRIVERPATH not defined. Well I thought, if CF can't set it up, I will set it up in Windows and use ODBC socket. But the issue is that the 64-bit Windows don't come with the relevant drivers needed to setup Access Datasource in Windows. After trying to figure out how to resolve this, googling and finding some information here and there, not much help was found. In the end it was realized, that the Windows\System32\odbcad32.exe file contained the proper drivers but the Windows\SysWOW64\odbcad32.exe did not contain the drivers. So the solution was to copy over the .exe from System32 to SysWOW64. I went through with that and it worked!! Even though, ColdFusion still gave a DRIVERPATH undefned error, the datasource was verified properly and I could run all my MS Access based demos.

Whew, finally, was done with setting up Coldfusion 9 64-bit on Windows 7 64-bit.