Prescan.exe finished with failure

We have started a large upgrade SPS 2003 to MOSS 2007 project for one of our customers. The approach we are taking is to the content database migration upgrade. As confusing as anything with the words migration and upgrade joined together may sound, there is a logic to the approach over the other ways of completing the upgrade, which I will get to later.

An important first step in the upgrade is to run the prescan.exe over your SPS 2003 environment and content database.

On the source SharePoint Portal Server, run the Office SharePoint Server 2007 Prescan utility.

You will need to copy the following files from a base MOSS installation (i.e. from C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\web server extensions\12\BIN)

• Prescan.exe
• PREUPGRADESCANCONFIG.XML (if you have created custom site definitions in SPS 2003, then update this file)

The syntax of the command is:

prescan.exe /c preupgradescanconfig.xml /V http://urlofsitecollectiontobeupgraded/

When I first ran this command, the results I got was the scan finished with failure.

And errors like these in my log file:

• Error: The following site has not been scanned. Id = 2ceb5f7d-gb8b-41ff-ad61-0712e0e9098a and Url = test/jr
• Error: The following list has not been scrubbed: Id=2ceb5f7d-gb8b-4c71-b251-0712e0e9098a, Name=Web Part Gallery, Containing Web=personal/alfpha

What I found out here was the prescan was failing because of some orphaned lists that needed to be removed from the content database.

The resolution to this involved:

1. As well as making sure you have SPS 2003 SP2 and WSS SP2, you will net to get this hotfix http://support.microsoft.com/kb/918743

2. Once you have the hotfix, follow the steps on this KB http://support.microsoft.com/kb/918744
• To detect orphaned items, use the following command line:
stsadm -o databaserepair -url http://URLofWindowsSharePointServicesSite -databasename DatabaseName
• To delete orphaned items, use the following command line:
stsadm -o databaserepair -url http://URLofWindowsSharePointServicesSite -databasename DatabaseName -deletecorruption

3. This resolved all my issues but one.
To resolve my last issue also involved using the stsadm command line.
In this case I used it to delete the site /test/jr with the following syntax:

Stsadm –o deletesite –url http://SITENAME/test/jr

From there I was able to successfully run the prescan.exe utility and get to the next step of the upgrade process.

A couple of other good references for similar prescan and orphan issues are:

• William Baer - Understanding PRESCAN.EXE Errors
  http://blogs.technet.com/wbaer/archive/2006/12/22/prescan-errors-what-they-mean.aspx
• Joel Oleson's SharePoint Land - SharePoint Orphans and Twins - Gotta love the little guys http://blogs.msdn.com/joelo/archive/2006/06/23/644954.aspx