The pre-installation activities for the Magento application are similar to those demonstrated for the Zen Cart application. You must download the application package and unzip it in the same manner. You must also create a database for the application before running the installation scripts.

Magento requires that you turn on InnoDB Storage Engine support in the MySQL database. With the release of version 1.2.1 Magento added InnoDB checks to the installer, and the installation will fail if this support is not enabled.

To enable this support go the C:\xampp\mysql\bin directory and open the "my.cnf" file in a text editor and change the following lines so that the InnoDB support is activated. You will also need to stop and restart the MySQL database for these changes to take affect.

# Comment the following if you are using InnoDB tables
# skip-innodb
innodb_data_home_dir = "C:/xampp/mysql/"
innodb_data_file_path = ibdata1:10M:autoextend
innodb_log_group_home_dir = "C:/xampp/mysql/"
innodb_log_arch_dir = "C:/xampp/mysql/"
## You can set .._buffer_pool_size up to 50 - 80 %
## of RAM but beware of setting memory usage too high
innodb_buffer_pool_size = 16M
innodb_additional_mem_pool_size = 2M
## Set .._log_file_size to 25 % of buffer pool size
innodb_log_file_size = 5M
innodb_log_buffer_size = 8M
innodb_flush_log_at_trx_commit = 1
innodb_lock_wait_timeout = 50