Microsoft SQL 2000 SP4 In-Place Upgrade to SQL 2005 – Upgrade Advisor Error

We had a very old server running SQL 2000 SP4 that we needed to upgrade to SQL 2005, as we didn’t have the staff resource available for a complete rebuild of the whole server to Windows 2008 and SQL 2008 we decided to do an inplace upgrade.

All seemed to go swiminingly until I hit this error:

UpgradeAdvisor returned -1 .

(There is no error message given its just blank.)

The error is caused by the upgrade advisor failing. The solution is below:

Close the setup program, then do the following:

Copy the BPAClient.dll file from the following location C:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\90\Setup Bootstrap\BPA\bin to C:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\90\Setup Bootstrap\BPA.

Then restart the installer again. You should find it works. It appears the problem is caused by a file that is expected to be someone isn’t and the advisor fails.

Some useful links:

http://www.techrepublic.com/article/make-the-jump-to-sql-server-2005-with-these-notes-and-tips/6036309

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/sqlserverfaq/archive/2009/07/15/upgrade-advisor-returns-error-while-upgrading-an-instance-of-sql-server-2000-to-sql-server-2005.aspx