I recently had a P6 problem that I thought I would share with you. P6 was up and running yesterday but today when I tried to run it, it generated an error on logon and it would not start. The problem was evidently with the connection to the SQL data server. The exact error reading was, “Bad public user name or password, Database Server Error: Named Pipes Provider; Could not open a connection to SQL Server [2].;” What this really means is that your SQL database server never started.

Knowing that I had done nothing (overt) to cause this, I closed-down P6 and rebooted my computer and tried again. The same error was generated. I looked into the SQL log directory (C:\Program Files\MSSQL\Primavera\MSSQL.2\MSSQL\LOG) and read the error logs. [By the way, your directory names may differ from mine.] It seems that the tempdb (temporary database) files could not be initialized. The log further said that a possible cause of this might be lack of free space on the harddisk.

My computer is quite full, but I checked and found that I had 20 GB of space free. I did notice that the disk defragmenter program showed that I had a lot of disk fragmentation and not much continuous space anywhere. I ran Disk Defrag and then rebooted my computer. I ran P6 and the entire thing ran perfectly. To paraphrase Inspector Clouseau, “Problem sol-ved.”