Question : SPS Portal Restore to New Farm..

Hello - i'm hoping someone can help with this problem.

We are replicating our sharepoint infrastructure onto 2 new farms (the
company is demergin so we need to create 2 new environments for
everything we have!).


Currently we have 2 farms that either host sharepoint sites for
internal users (e.g. company intranet) or external users (e.g.
collaboration sites).  The Farms are setup as:


2 x Web Servers (WSS 2.0 & SPS 2003)
1 x Job & Index Server (WSS 2.0 & SPS 2003)
1 x SQL Server (SQL Server 2000).


The 2 new companies will have 1 Farm with all the sites consolidated
into it.  Don't ask why there are 2 farms currently - it was
inherited!


Anyway, i am using the SPS Backup and Restore Utility to backup
portals and restore.  Everything works as expected for Portals backed
up from the internal farm but not for the external farm.


On restoring a portal we receive the following errors:


In SPS Backup & Restore Utility following message is displayed,
usually about 35% through the restore: "Error: The site database
specified is already in use by another component of the farm".  The
popup box also says to consult the database servers event log.


The SQL Server eventlog has the following entry: "Recovery is
checkpointing database 'Projects1_SITE'."


The SQL Activity logs has an entry that says: "Bypassing recovery for
database 'Projects1_SITE' because it is marked IN LOAD." Followed by:
"Recovery is checkpointing database 'Projects_SITE' (18)"


I have seen posts that say to do the restore with the NORECOVERY
switch but i don't see where to specify that using the SPS Backup &
Restore Utility.


Any advice would be greatly appreciated.


Thanks.

Answer : SPS Portal Restore to New Farm..

Check the sps_config database and look for the databases table if there is an entry. Then delete the entry that references the portal you are trying to restore. And try again to restore using the Sharepoint Portal Utility.