Robert on Software Development

Fixing Issues with the SharePoint SP2 Upgrade

Yesterday I installed Service Pack 2 for WSS 3.0 and MOSS 2007 on the two servers in our Development farm. I purposely did not follow the guidelines for upgrading SharePoint as I wanted to see what happened when I ran the installer. Since it’s a dev environment, there was no risk.

Long story short, the upgrade on both of my servers failed. Looking at the logs, I saw this:

[SPManager] [ERROR] [6/2/2009 10:44:16 AM]: The system cannot find the path specified.

That’s it. That’s all I had to go on. After some hemming and hawing and tearing my hair out, I figured out what the problem was. It’s not that the installer can’t find a path, it’s that the IIS metabase is pointing to a “dead site,” or a site defined in IIS for which the directory structure doesn’t exist. That fixed the problem on the database server.

On the farm’s front-end server, I got the same error, but I didn’t think that it was a problem with IIS.

My solution was to simply detach and reattach the content database, which is what Microsoft says to do in its best practices document for upgrading SharePoint.

If you choose to not follow the directions and end up with the “file not found” error, try this.

First, execute this command (replace the bracketed items with your details, without brackets of course):

stsadm –o deletecontentdb –url [http://example.com] –databasename [contentdbname] –databaseserver [databaseserver]

Don’t worry about the word “delete” in the command. It doesn’t actually delete your database. It just detaches it.

Once that’s done, reattach the content database via:

stsadm –o addcontentdb –url [http://example.com] –databasename [contentdbname] –databaseserver [databaseserver]

Now run psconfig to tie it all together:

psconfig –cmd upgrade –inplace b2b –wait –force

The configuration completed and everything worked.

My suggestion is to follow Microsoft's SharePoint upgrade best practices document to the letter. This is the best way to head off these kinds of issues. And always make sure you back up your content and configuration databases before you upgrade. Few things are worse than rebuilding a SharePoint farm from scratch.