Let me start by saying I am not a Sharepoint Champion by any means. My specialty is networks and security, hence why I am posting here. We needed to migrate our WSS to another server. The new server already had WSS3 installed and ready to go so we began upgrading the current WSS to WSS3 SP2. The initial WSS upgrade went through of the WSS framework went through fine as far as I saw. First we ran the Prescan.exe tool successfully. Then we began the Sharepoint Products and Technologies Configuration Wizard. It completed and dropped us into the Sharepoint Central Admin where you can see the upgrade process running. This upgrade process failed with an access violation - found and fixed the problem which was web.config (read-only). Out of time, we stopped and returned in the morning to continue. During the evening the server was rebooted. I found an MSDN article that gave directions to start that process again with "psconfig -cmd upgrade -force -inplace b2b" which failed with an error stating the -force parameter was incorrect. It was suggested to run the Sharepoint Products and Technologies Config Tool again and report any errors. This time everything completed successfully. My problem and catastrophe now is that there is a new site set up in WSS3. Not one bit of evidence that a previous site even existed. Now I'm in deep! How do I go about recovering the old site, recovering old data maybe, recovering anything possible. The server still has the initial #SSEE database present with Sharepoint, STS and WSS databases inside. It also has a $SHAREPOINT instance with STS databases only. If anyone can suggest a path I can take to try and piece this back together (if possible), I would be more than appreciative. Before you ask, we don't have a current backup as the server would freeze during the backup (hence why we are migrating everything away with plan to decommission it asap). I managed to get a bkf backup but the bkf claims to be unreadable by NTBackup. Yes I know I'm in a pickle! ------------------------------------ Further to this post - The server is a Windows 2003 Enterprise SP2. The Programs register shows both WSS2 and WSS3 are currently installed. WSS3 seems to be full installed and operational in a greenfield state. The old site is no longer accessible.

Could you explain better? Have you done an upgrade in place? Because in this case you have not many solutions. Wwhen you run an upgrade in place all information and data are replaced and it's impossible to restore an old version os SharePoint if you have not a backup.FabioA

Unfortunately yes. It was an in-place upgrade. We have a copy of the old database before the upgrade though. Looking into extracting all the files and folders, and anything else useful to rebuild the site. Any suggestions would be appreciated.

Yeah that is a possibility, but I ran into too many issues. As it turned out, it was easier to just export the docs out into folders. Started a new WSS3 from scratch, imported folder base into new site, then handed over the internal IT guys to rebuild the site (properly this time). Worked out well because the old site was never built correctly to begin with. Thanks for the help tho. Cheers, Jonas

Jonas, if you have a copy of old database you are ok. The procedure is this: install on another server a new WSS 2.0 farm create a new "web application" (I don't remember the exact name on WSS 2.0) to re-create a new structure with a root address (http://somethings) and an empty database. Remove this empty database and replace it with old copy that you have restored on SQL Server At this point you can have your old site web with all data file My two cent FabioA