Reinstalling SharePoint 2010

I recently tried to take a couple of SharePoint 2010 servers from the Beta install bits to the Release Candidate install bits and wanted to do that without having to reinstall the OS. I didn’t have access to the physical machine and wasn’t charged with maintaining the OS so in spite of SharePoint’s poor track record SharePoint uninstalls in previous versions, I thought I’d give it a try.

After uninstalling SharePoint 2010 Beta and restarting the server, it initially looked promising. The first part of the install where it installs the software worked fine. I hit the first snag when running the SharePoint 2010 Products Configuration Wizard. The Wizard started, said that “This wizard will upgrade SharePoint Products.” which didn’t bode well for the uninstall being successful. After prompting for the configuration settings (configuration database server and configuration database name) although not allowing me to change them from my previous install settings (I was hoping that I could give it a new config DB name), it failed with this message:
Configuration Failed
One or more configuration settings failed. Completed configuration settings will not be rolled back. Resolve the problem and run this configuration wizard again. The following contains detailed information about the failure:
Failed to initial the upgrade sequence.
An exception of type Microsoft.SharePoint.Upgrade.SPUpgradeException was thrown. Additional exception information: Exception of type ‘Microsoft.SharePoint.Upgrade.SPUpgradeException’ was thrown.

Given this error, I thought the next logical step was to delete the SharePoint config database myself and re-run the Products Configuration Wizard. Again, the wizard said that it would upgrade SharePoint products and let me proceed to the next step. It then failed again with this message.
Configuration Failed
One or more configuration settings failed. Completed configuration settings will not be rolled back. Resolve the problem and run this configuration wizard again. The following contains detailed information abou the failure:
Failed to initialize SharePoint Products upgrade.
An exception of type System.Data.SqlClient.SqlException was thrown. Additional exception information: Cannot open database “ShaerPoint_Config” requested by the login. The login failed.

After a little more research, I found that I could modify the value of the “SetupType” key in the HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Shared Tools\Web Server Extensions\14.0\WSS registry hive from B2B_Upgrade to CLEAN_INSTALL. Once I did that, I ran the Products Configuration Wizard again and got a new error in a pop-up dialog. This error was:
Failed to detect if this server is joined to a server farm. Possible reasons for this failure could be that you no longer have the appropriate permissions to the server farm, the database server hosting the server farm is unresponsive, the configuration database is inaccessible or this server has been removed from the server farm.


But this time, the Products Configuration Wizard gave me the option to “Disconnect from this server farm:” and finish. After finishing, I re-ran the Products Configuration Wizard one more time and hit just one more snag. SharePoint does not like installing if there is already a IIS web site in place called SharePoint Central Administration. Once I deleted that web site, the Products Configuration Wizard completed successfully and SharePoint 2010 Release Candidate successfully installed and configured on my server.

Why We Make SharePoint Work

This is the blog for my company, Avitiva, Inc.. We are a group of consultants that are very passionate about SharePoint and making it work. We are especially passionate when it comes to using SharePoint as a Business Intelligence (BI) tool, as a tool to standardize repeated processes and as a platform for making existing knowledge, data, measurements accessible as information to all intended users.

We’ve been working with SharePoint since its first release in 2001 and the experience with four versions (including 2010), has given us a pretty good tool set to understand how to make SharePoint work, how to make SharePoint supportable, how to do crazy things with the out-of-box (OOB) features (intended or not) and how to envision the trajectory on which SharePoint is traveling.

This blog is intended to be our notes on the SharePoint, BI, SQL Server experiences we have. We captured some of these in the SharePoint 2007 Bible published by Wiley press (and now available in Chinese), but intend for this blog to be a more immediate way to communicate what we are playing with and learning.