Backup and restore of SharePoint Portal Server 2003
I got the following question through e-mail, and I thought I try to reply here, so if i'm talking nonsense other people can correct me:
I'm sorry to be bothering you, but I don't know what else to try and our team is reaching the peak of frustration . We're trying to recover a Sharepoint Portal Server 2003 on another machine (read «move it to a new machine» - preserve the same machine name, same IP address, etc, since it's purpose is to substitute the old one), we successfully recover the portal using the Sharepoint Portal Server Backup and Restore Tool, however when we try to access the portal site we receive this message:
«Cannot complete this action.
Please try again.»
The SharePoint Sites seem to be restored ok and seem to be working (Team Sites, Document Workspaces, etc). - BUT the user logins fail to work however, only the username «Administrator» is working.
When we try to access the PORTAL we receive the error describe above («Cannot complete this action .» - see the attached screenshot), on every page, meaning we can't even take a peek at the site settings, since those also return the error.
We don't know what else to try . and all the documentation we find is vague and doesn't give a step-by-step how-to which could point us to «what the hell are we doing wrong?!» (this includes the «SharePoint Products and Technologies Resource Kit Chapter 28: Disaster Recovery (Preview)»
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=60bd8fe5-804e-4a49-83db-ea41beb80f3b&displaylang=en ).I've read somewhere that you might be required to recreate «some registry keys», but can't find any documentation that states which ones .
I don't know if this information might be of any use, but we have both webpart's installed using the stsadm.exe tool (.cab files) and webpart's (.dwp) uploaded directly to the WebPart Library via the Site Settings on the original Portal Site that we are trying to move to a new machine. We have recreated by hand the Active Directory domain controller on the new machine as well, and double checked all the user and group informations.
My reply:
You probably had the situation that you did rebuild the complete machine that also acted as the only active directory domain controller, and that you recreated the users by hand. This means that all users got new SID's (unique ID's). If you had another AD controller, the new AD domain controller would synchronize existing account using correct SID's. The Administrator account does ALWAYS have access to SharePoint as a portal administrator (has all the rights). What you can try is to empty the UserInfo table in the XXX_SITE table, and probably recreate all security in your portal (maybe groups will remain, so if you are using groups and cross site groups you are lucky, you only have to add the correct account to these groups again!). Please note that this are all assumptions, and that I have no idea if it will solve your problem or maybe completely ruin your installation. I hope that other people who have more insight in this topic will respond as well!