Moving WSS 3.0 Databases

Tuesday, November 18th, 2008 | Tech Help

WSS 3.0 uses Microsoft SQL Embedded Edition (MSEE) for its data store. When MSEE is installed, the data files are installed to your C: drive by default. Since you do not want to have a file on your system drive that can grow exponentially, you need to move it to another drive. Here is how you do it.

Note: While completing this process your WSS site will be offline to your users.

Shutdown all Windows Sharepoint services & IIS Admin service: This will ensure that there are no locks on the files you need to move.
Open a cmd prompt and cd to C:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\90\Tools\binn
Enter sqlcmd -S \\.\pipe\mssql$microsoft##ssee\sql\query -E: This starts the Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Command Line Query Utility
Enter the following commands to view the available databases & hit Enter after each:

SELECT name from sysdatabases
GO

You should see a number of DBs, move the following 4 databases (GUID’s may be different):

SharePoint_Config_c464b7ce-59ef-4820-9f75-f46a0937c08e
SharePoint_AdminContent_451452bf-9dc0-40c9-be18-14f14bc23007
WSS_Search_NETSERVER_86a140c5958d4a5d97c8c2cbee745424
WSS_Content

Enter the following commands & hit Enter after each line. Repeat for each database.
- EXEC sp_detach_db @dbname = ‘Content_Database_name’
- GO
Move the databases to their new location. They can be found in C:\Windows\SSQL\Data\.mdf and _log.ldf
After the files have been moved run the following commands (Make sure to change the itialic sections to your specifics):