Recently we tried installing the July 2010 update for WSS on our server that hosted several of our client’s Sharepoint sites. The update didn’t complete successfully and to our horror we found none of or client Sharepoint sites were working. Windows Event Log and Sharepoint Log reveled the below error
“The database on server_name\Microsoft##SSEE is not accessible to missing Windows Internal Database signatures”
We checked the database, service accounts, restarted Sharepoint services but nothing resulted in success.After several hours of breaking our heads and web searching we found out that the issue was because the websites were not provisioned successfully(more info on Microsoft support). The steps given in the MS kb article provided us the initial lead and then we figured out the remaining pieces.
Below are the steps to be followed for fixing Microsoft##SSEE is not accessible Issue
1. Stop SP web service with below command
stsadm -o provisionservice -action stop -servicetype spwebservice -servicename ""Note: You don't have to specify service name here. Just empty quotes would do.
2. Start the SP web service with the below command
stsadm -o provisionservice -action start -servicetype spwebservice -servicename ""
3. Run the PSConfig command with the below parameters
psconfig -cmd upgrade -inplace b2b -wait -force
4. Restart all Sharepoint services
5. Restart IIS
This would bring back all Sharepoint sites to life. However the following this have to be handled
1. Any changes done to web.config files would not be preserved so these changes have to be applied again.
2. Bin directory of SharePoint sites will be cleaned. So any custom components that were placed here has to be placed again.
3. IIS settings would have been overridden. They have to be applied again.
