Upgrading to MOSS SP1

This past weekend I was set to upgrade the Web server to MOSS SP1 and see if there were any perfomance and stability gains. I looked over the many documents that Microsoft published to make sure I had all my ducks in a row. I also checked with our hosting company to make sure that they could restore the server to a previous snapshot in case the upgrade went bad.





Good thing I did that!!





One of the biggest things to keep in mind with this Service Pack is that there is no way to uninstall it. You have to uninstall ALL of MOSS and then reinstall it and connect the new installation to your content databases.





The upgrade to SP1 can be quite long, depending on how many laguage packs you have installed.





The upgrade for my particular installation looked like this:

• Install WSS 3.0 SP1



• Install MOSS 2007 SP1



• Run config wizard



• Install WSS 3.0 Spanish Language Pack SP1



• Install MOSS 2007 Spanish Language Pack SP1



• Install WSS 3.0 French Language Pack SP1



• Install MOSS 2007 French Language Pack SP1



• Run config wizard



• Install Post-SP1 hotfix for variation issue



• Bring site back online and make sure everything still works

The first two items on the list went very smooth. The third one, not so much. I ran the config wizard and it got to step 8 of 9 (which is the one that actually updates the DBs) and it failed and told me to check the log file. I looked in the logs and traced back to the errors and the first one I found said 'The b2b timer job failed.' That was it! No description of what failed or anything. So my mind started to go into panic mode and I went to check to make sure that the site would run at all and it did. So then I began poking around on the net for people that had similar issues. There were tons of articles and posts from people that said they received the same error and stopped various services and ran psconfig and then ran the config wizard and everything worked fine then.

No such luck with my installation. No matter what I tried I still got the same error message with no better explanation. After three hours of searching, I decided to leave it and let our hosting company restore the server.

I will be diving further into this error in the near future as I saw some posts that said Microsoft will not support you if you do not upgrade to SP1 and I would really like the server to be running on it for stability reasons.

UPDATE: I finally figured out what was causing the upgrade to fail. Something was wrong with the Shared Services Database, so I created a new Shared Services Provider since the only thing running on it was Search and deleted the old one. I then moved the site collections to use the new SSP. I then ran the updates and the configuration wizard ran fine. After getting the updates installed I had some other issues with Primay Key Exceptions which led to installing another hotfix, but finally have my test installation upgraded to post-SP1.