Forcing Sharepoint Server 2007 Uninstallation

Hello everyone...

This is a hot post...a few minutes ago I was trying to forcing a SharePoint Server 2007 uninstallation, the reason...well the farm totally crashes...well I have all the responsibility over the fault, because I detach the ContentDB for the Central Administration Site, I tried to attach it again, but with no success.

So in my test environment I decided to restart the process, but for my surprise I can’t remove the MOSS installation, well the reasons are so clear, I destroy the farm, but why the uninstallation program fails...?

Surfing over the internet, I found a post a little strange for my, but after a while of thinking on it…is so logical, the way to force the uninstall…

To force the uninstallation of both products to get back to a stable state, this is what I did.

I had no data to save, this was only a test environment, I’m so lucky!!

I renamed the DSN in the registry for a moment:

HKLM >> Software >> Microsoft >> Shared Tools >> Web Server extensions >> 12 >>Secure >> ConfigDB >> DSN to DNS1,for example…the name is not important.

Then you can:

- Uninstall MOSS 2007.
- Delete the web applications and their respective AppPools.
- Delete the SQL databases.

After this you can rebuild the farm as you desire.

As a little note related with this, in some cases this problem occurs after the installation of KB 932091, update to WSS 3.0. The system was rebooted (by mistake) before the update was finished.

After that the system was unstable:

- I could not run the SharePoint Products and Technologies Configuration Wizard (Upgrade in progress).
- I could not uninstall Project Server 2007 or MOSS 2007, they both failed.

Log files indicated that the operations could not be completed because an update was in progress…

I hope that this helps, as I tested this procedure works in any case that the program fails or the system becomes unstable.

Best regards…

Paúl…