A client was moving their >7 year old SQL 2000 cluster to SQL 2005. Reason? Old hardware and staying up-to-date with latest software. Their SharePoint 2003 was also using this server.
This Microsoft KB article explains perfectly how to move the SP2003 database to an other server : Micosoft KB http://support.microsoft.com/kb/894164
However our situation was a little different. We needed to migrate to a new server AND switch from SQL 2000 to SQL 2005.
The KB article mentioned above will work fine until you start the restore. It almost immediately returns an error.
“SQL Server restore failed. Error: The operation failed on server . For more information, see the Microsoft Windows Event Log on that server.”
But there is no trace of any error in the event viewer. 
However the SharePoint log file in $program files$\Sharepoint Portal server\logs did gave us a clue:
“To connect to this server you must use SQL Server Management Studio or SQL Server Management Objects (SMO)”
Some shared dll’s that handle the communication to SQL 2005 are missing.
So go here and select the needed components
Or get a SQL 2005 CD , do a custom install and only select the client components and documenation option. You do not need to install a new database, analysis etc…
After a 15 min setup you end up with 700Mb less free space on your hard drive.
Starting up the restore again and it worked!! It took >3 hours to restore the whole 16GB of SharePoint data.
Then final 2 steps are needed. 1. upgrade your virtual sites and set the IIS webs to ASP.NET 1.1 et voila.
Short wrap-up of the needed steps :
- Install SQL 2005 client components (on SharePoint 2003 machine)
- Follow this KB article.
- After the restore. Run following command for every virtual site :
stsadm -o upgrade -forceupgrade -url http://some.url/ - Go to IIS. Get the websites properties and make sure ASP.NET is set to ASP.NET 1.1.
Set it explicity to .NET 2.0 and back tot 1.1 to make sure !!!!
Hope this helps.
