I'm new to DNN and also ran into the same problem, I searched and found this site: http://www.dnncreative.com/tabid/289/Default.aspx?PageContentID=122

I was able to get things up and running fairly painlessly thanks to that tutorial.  Hope it helps!

Thanks for the link to your site I found a tutorial for installing 4.4.1 under this link "http://www.mitchelsellers.com/Blogs/tabid/54/articleType/ArticleView/articleId/28/Default.aspx" it seemed to be what I was looking for even thou I was installing 4.5.3, it explained step by step on how to create the database and user and how to setup the virtual directory in IIS. I found it to be helpful in the fact that it showed me how the whole process is setup but I ran into a problem. After I set it up step by step and navigated to the site http://localhost/DotNetNuke/ I get the "The page cannot be found" page instead of what I guess was suppose to show up as the installer page. Like I said I am very new to the whole process but I am guessing I did not install SQL correctly or something because I even tried installer.exe found on "http://www.dotnetnuke.com/DotNetNukeProjects/UtilityInstaller/Downloads/tabid/871/Default.aspx" and it did the same thing where the "The page cannot be found" page was their instead of the installer page. This might be an easy fix or a generic error but what do you think I could be doing wrong?