WSS 3.0 2 servers consolidation options

Question

I've got a customer looking to consolidate 2 WSS 3.0 servers onto one. Usually I deal with SharePoint standard edition and can get at the databases with SQL Management studio etc. I should be able to do that for this site as well. I am just puzzling out how to achive this.

Would it be a case of having to create another site collection and attaching the database from the other server or attempt some kind of export / import operation on it. I believe the DBs are under 4GB since they were setup using the wizard.

Any suggestions are much appreciated. I would suggest they go to SharePoint Foundation but having some licencing issues for Server 2008 R2.

Answer 1

I'll answer this myself:

Backup database from Windows Internal Database using SQL server management studio Express and connect to the WID instance using named pipes:

\\.\pipe\MSSQL$MICROSOFT##SSEE\sql\query

Using SQL management studio backup the content databases in question and copy those to the target WSS 3.0 server.

Prep the target WSS 3.0 server in this case I was using a full version of SQL Server 2005. Restore databases from the copied server.

Create new web application with no site collection Remove content DB from newly created web application Add content DB from original server to the newly created web application and there you have it 1 site collection was showing and working as the original did as it was vanilla without any solutions.