Question : Problems reinstalling Intranet services in SBS 2003

I experienced some problems after installing Sharepoint. We lost OWA and RWW and were unable to reinstall these.

Someone on the forum pointed me towards kb829114 (removing/installing SBS2003 Sharepoint)  and although everything uninstalled fine, when I install the Intranet again I get the message  "An error occurred while installing Windows SharePoint Services and creating your intranet site" and the installation fails. This message is normally associated with the old SBS Disk 3, but Im using one with the new digital certificate.

Ive tried running kb832880 as suggested but this crashes with a  Fatal error during installation message.

In IIS the Web sites are empty as these were removed as part of kb829114 and the Default Web Site ID had become corrupted.

Thanks for any ideas.

Mike

Answer : Problems reinstalling Intranet services in SBS 2003

Yeah... at this point, you really would be MUCH better off doing that.  I know that if I were sitting in front of that server I'd be able to get it all back running again, but that doesn't mean that there aren't going to be some wild settings that don't get modified by reinstalling the components... leaving a legacy of "unexpected" behaviors to haunt the remainder of the server's live cycle.

You would be much better off starting fresh, now that you've learned as much as you have about SBS.  FYI, the general consensus is that it takes at least three times to install an SBS correctly.  (see http://sbsurl.com/3x)  It took me four the first time.

Basically you need to export your Exchange Mailboxes out with EXMerge (http://sbsurl.com/exmerge) and copy all the data files off to a USB Hard drive.  Then, run a FULL NTBackup (not including Exchange or System State) of all files just so you have them... such as the SharePoint databases.

Then, unjoin all workstations from the domain into a workgroup.  As long as you rejoin them properly using http:///connectcomputer you will reclaim the user's local profile and retain all of their settings and preferences.

You should definitely follow the SBS Getting Started Guide (http://sbsurl.com/start) and if you want a good book to help guide you, check out my recommendations at http://sbsurl.com/list

Jeff
TechSoEasy