How I upgraded Companyweb (wss 2.0) to WSS 3.0

Ok, I promised Zak I would do this and I finally got around to taking my jibberish notes and pasting them in here (sorry, this won’t be an ellaborate HOWTO with diagrams, the intended audience here is someone that is familiar with WSS already).

How I upgraded Companyweb (wss 2.0) to WSS 3.0

1. I used VMware’s Vconverter to take a *complete* copy of the existing SBS Server, to work with offline (the intent was to retire WSS 2.0 by simply stopping the site, not whack it/replace it)
2. I took the VM guest onto a separate network (not routable to production) in order to ensure I could boot it and convert free of obstruction with production
3. I backed up Company Web as a WSS 2.0 Site backup
4. I restored Company Web to a new Virtual Site instance (to break the ‘companyweb’ name, etc. as I’m convinced, through other testing that failed during upgrade tests, that M$ looks for CompanyWeb and effectively stops it from continuing a successful upgrade)
5. I then installed WSS 3.0
6. Ran Prescan /all
7. Ran the Configuration Wizard
8. Completed upgrade in Central Administration

While it took many painful attempts/steps in the middle (and not my comments about backing up WSS 2.0 and restoring to a different WSS 2.0 web application), the end result was just doing the steps above. Maybe this will help someone.

Heck, if it did, let me know…
https://www.itgroove.net/cms/index.php?option=com_wrapper&view=wrapper&Itemid=27
Sean

ps. the above is officially unsupported of course 🙂