Our company purchased a boxed retail variant of MS SQL Server 2014 Standard with 10 CAL. Original product delivered from reseller, problem is the DVD media is faulty and cannot be read on 4 different PCs.
I contacted store and they told me to call Microsoft as reseller’s policy prohibits them from replacing open-box software products.
Called Microsoft Software and Hardware Support line, ended up talking to a dozen people in 6 different departments, getting transferred somewhere else forever. Wasted already around 6 hours on this and nobody can help, unless we call “Professional Support” and open a ticket for $250 per incident … just to exchange worthless DVD media. Another advice I heard was to contact reseller again as they are supposed to replace it (they say they don’t).
Looks like one may spend $3k on a commercial piece of software and still be unable to use it (physical installation media is faulty) and everybody involved washes their hands off.
Even tried contacting MS Store seeing they have SQL 2014 STD as Download option thinking maybe they can give me a link to copy of media (we already have the product key, right?), but learned that we would have to purchase it first …
So, is it even possible to exchange retail DVD media for SQL 2014 Standard edition? Our company is not a Volume Licensing customer, so the VL department won’t help us with their downloadable links.