When I was onsite recently doing a sharepoint migration to MOSS 2007 from WSS V3 –
for whatever reason all the servers (and databases) were blown away and all the client
had was one content database of their site.

(Who said client sites werent exciting)

My solution here:
(1) install and configure the farm independent of the original content database
(2) Setup the the Shared Services for the Farm
(3) Extend 1 virtual server and create a new content database.
Here’s the trick….

(4) From ‘Application Management’->’Content Databases’….add another ContentDB
(5) Now select the original ContentDB as an additional one to add.
At this point when you click ‘OK’ there should be two in the list
(I had to actually drop to the command line as this content database addition was
going to take more time than the webinterface allowed.
stsadm -o addcontentdb -databasefile:….. -databaserver:….. -url:……)
(6) From the list of two Content Databases – take the non-original ContentDB offline
and then remove it.
Viola! Worked a treak…I had to sort out a couple of things around links etc.

(I did try a few other techniques first and got a whole bunch of errors around ‘object
not in the correct state’)

Cheers,

Mick.