D had asked me to rebuild the Test Server a few weeks back.  He was having some trouble with one of his applications, and we thought it might have been caused by installing the .Net 3.5 framework.  This wasn’t the case, but the Test server has been with us from the very beginning and had…

D had asked me to rebuild the Test Server a few weeks back.  He was having some trouble with one of his applications, and we thought it might have been caused by installing the .Net 3.5 framework.  This wasn’t the case, but the Test server has been with us from the very beginning and had built up some cruft over time, so a rebuild seemed like a good idea.

My first attempt to just uninstall Sharepoint and .Net 3.5 failed, so after some debate, I formatted the drive and started fresh.  After a bit of hunting for network drivers (HP, why don’t you just make them available for download?) I had the box up and running.

To save time, I did a Full install of Sharepoint, which uses SQL Lite, and has everything preconfigured.  When I tried to restore, the process kept failing with the error: “Your backup is from a different version of Windows SharePoint Services and cannot be restored to a server running the current version. The backup file should be restored to a server with version ‘1836597052.1702240364.1869181810.824327’ or later.”

I opened a case with Microsoft, and together we eventually determined that this error had nothing to do with the Sharepoint version, it was a simple file access error.  I made the backup files available via a network share that was fully accessible to all, and that problem was solved.  Next up, Sharepoint complained about being unable to create a content database. 

So, I uninstalled Sharepoint and SQL Lite, then reinstalled a full version of SQL along with Sharepoint.  This time, everything worked.  I got my original sites restored, and aside from a few 3rd party Web Parts that need to be installed, everything is working.