Our SharePoint server just had a catastrophic failure and is not longer available. It was running Windows Server 2003 Standard and WSS 3.0 Service Pack 2. Luckily we had a SQL backup process and we have a recent backup of the SharePoint_Config and WSS_Content databases, so we thought we would be fine. When rebuilding the server we took the oppourtunity to upgrade the OS to Windows Server 2008 R2. However, this seems to require WSS 3.0 Service Pack 3. We've installed that and it appears to be working. However, the databases it generated were in the Microsoft Internal Database rather than the default instance of SQL 2008 we had already installed. I can find no way to successfully restore the SP2 versions of the databases. If I try to simple restore over the new databases I get an error that the configuration database cannot be reached. I tried using the SharePoint administrator site to point to a restored copy of the WSS_Content database, but that failed with an error stating that the content database needed to be updated first. Can anyone point me to a walkthough or provide guidance on how to restore the databases in my circumstances?

SharePoint use Windows Internal Database because you choose Standalone installation, if you choose Farm installation, you can choose the database instance to use in configuration wizard. You’d better not use the restored configuration database, you can create a new SharePoint farm (new configuration database) and configure it manually again in Central Administration. To add the restored copy of content database to the new SharePoint farm, you can detach (in SharePoint, not in SQL Server) the existing content database from the SharePoint web application and then add the restored copy with stsadm –o addcontentdb command. It will upgrade the content database for you and you can check the upgrade log for issue during the upgrade. For detail, please read http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc287862(office.12).aspx#section3 Gu Yuming TechNet Subscriber Support in forum If you have any feedback on our support, please contact tngfb@microsoft.com