UrbanDude

Occasionally I'll need to migrate a WSS 2.0 site into a MOSS 2007 farm.  From what I understand, the only way to do this is to upgrade the installation to WSS 3.0, then backup/restore it to the farm.  Here's some tips I wish I knew about before getting started.  But what happens if the upgrade goes horribly wrong and the only backups are FWP files?  This happened to me recently - the database upgrade failed, corrupted the WSS 2.0 DB schema, and there were no DB backups.  All I had as a backup were the nightly FWP files that are exported. The site was down, users are screaming, and there's no hope for getting that server back to a working state. What to do...

I uninstalled the WSS 3.0 installation, uninstalled WSS 2.0, then installed WSS 2.0, bringing the server back to a state where it was as clean as a fresh install.  But when I attemped to use STSADM.EXE to restore the FWP files, I got this message:

"Your backup is from a different version of Windows Sharepoint Services and cannot be restored to a server running the current version."

Huh?  They're both running WSS 2.0, but I didn't realize that it has to be the EXACT same minor version (service packs, hotfixes).  There no way of finding out what version of Sharepoint it was from the FWP files, which makes the backups all but useless.  After reading this post, aptly titled "Adventures in Migrating from WSS 2.0 to MOSS 2007", I started to panic (a little), but with enough tinkering, I was able to get the site back to a usable state.  Here's how:

1. I erased the default empty team site
   stsadm -o deletesite -url http://XXXX
2. Created an untemplated site
   stsadm.exe -o createsite -url http://XXXX -ownerlogin domain\username -owneremail bryan@urbandude.com
3. Used smigrate to restore the site
   smigrate -r -w http://XXXXX -f d:\backup\spdaily.fwp -u domain\username -pw MyPassword

This post is mostly a note to my future self, but hopefully a desperate/hopeless person out there finds this and it helps them out of a jam.

I finally found a fix to a reoccurring problem I've been having with Sharepoint Designer 2007!

Problem

For some unknown reason certain files in Sharepoint Designer 2007 would show they were checked out when they were actually checked in. This would cause me big headaches when I would edit a file and try to check-in or publish - an error dialog box would pop up saying "Cannot perform this operation. The file is no longer check out or has been deleted." - which meant Sharepoint Designer was pretty much useless. "Recalculate Hyperlinks" didn't help.

The only way I could get Sharepoint Designer to recognize the true state of the file was to rename the file, or I could go in to "Manage Content and Structure" via the browser and check the file out, but I had to remember to keep the file checked out if I published a major version. What a headache!

Resolution

Create a batch file with the following commands:

cd "%APPDATA%\Microsoft\Web Server Extensions\Cache"
del *.web /S /Q "%APPDATA%\Microsoft\Web Server Extensions\Cache"
cd "%USERPROFILE%\AppData\Local\Microsoft\WebsiteCache\"
rmdir /S /Q "%USERPROFILE%\AppData\Local\Microsoft\WebsiteCache\."
mkdir "%USERPROFILE%\AppData\Local\Microsoft\WebsiteCache"
dir "%APPDATA%\Microsoft\Web Server Extensions\Cache"
dir "%USERPROFILE%\AppData\Local\Microsoft\WebsiteCache"
pause

Run this whenever Sharepoint Designer needs a little kickstart.  You'll need to Run as Administrator on Vista. The last two commands are there to verify that everything was flushed properly.