Upgrade WSS 2.0 (with MSDE DBs) to WSS 3.0

One of my friends was in process to upgrade his WSS 2.0 to WSS 3.0 but the main challenge was he was using WSS 2.0 with MSDE database so in place upgrade will not be helping him.

To achieve the goal we have followed below steps.

• Copied all .mdf and .ldf files to new SQL server ( SQL 2005 )


• Restored all DBs from .mdf and .ldf which had created new content DBs on SQL 2005 machine


• Installed WSS 3.0 and connected it to SQL 2005


• Created dummy sites and attached all the DBs using STSADM command - 
  
  

  stsadm -o addcontentdb -url URL NAME –dn DB NAME- one by one to sites and we got all our old sites up and running.