Gather round my water logged cohorts, listen to my story of pain and joy. As with most award winning novels this story starts off in similar fashion…
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Summer, it was the season of Vacation, we had everything before us, but it was virtual, we were all going direct to migrate content, we were all going to have a good weekend - in short, things were supposed to be a day in the part, that said some of its noisiest authorities insisted on much preparation and testing for the task at hand. So be it, they sign the checks, and all tested well.
The task was to move two content databases from server “A” to dissimilar server “B”. So we test, simple SharePoint backup from “A” to “B”, viola! It works, in DEV. Fast-forward to the night of…Second verse same as the first. After a few network issues around a MSFT Clustering and Juniper switch gear (don’t ask, it’s another post) fiasco we have the web apps created and content DB’s in the restore process. Oh Darn!…It didn't work we now have the following problems to address.
Q1.)Contend DB failed the restore had to manually attach content DB. Ok…
A1.)Manually attach in SQL, GUI add via Central Admin.
Q2.)The SQL Log file drive full and I didn't have admin permissions
A2.)BackUp ContentDB and Shrink Logs and give myself permissions
Q3.)Pay attention!… This is the big one! NOT ALL OF THE SUB SITES ARE ACCESIBLE. But here is the kicker. The content is visible via “Manage Content and Structure” but when I tried to drill down SharePoint said the site had been deleted.
A3.)Bring up Central Admin, Enter Define Managed Paths, and Delete the managed path to the sub site collection in question.
Now let’s try that seemly mystery site again. Viola! IT works in Production.
I hope this little story aids someone in finding their happy ending.
Oh yeah… The END.