Upgrade Failure: "The installation and configuration of Team Foundation Server succeeded, however upgrading the data was unsuccessful"

If you received this message on the completion page of the TFS upgrade wizard, it means that the application tier of your TFS instance was successfully upgraded to the new version, but some or all of your team project collections were not.  In this case, you will be able to use TFS to create new projects and collections, but you will be unable to access your old content until you manage to successfully upgrade it as well.

The main reason for TFS being unable to upgrade team project collections is that their data was already either corrupted, incomplete, or stuck between schema versions.  You will need to contact customer support for assistance troubleshooting these data issues and getting your data back to a workable state.  However, there is also a chance that the upgrade process failed because TFS's network or SQL connection was lost partway through the upgrade.  Before calling support, you may want to double-check, and if necessary repair, these connections and then try re-running the upgrade on your project collections.  To retry the upgrade, remove all the non-functional team project collections from your new instance of TFS and use the attach command to attach the backups of these collections to your server.  Please remember to make a copy of your backups before attempting the attach so that you will still have a copy of your data in its original state in the event that the attach fails.

Comments

  • Anonymous
    April 08, 2014
    Hi, I have upgraded TFS 2010 to TFS2013 but one of the collections failed to upgrade due to error:Object reference not set to an instance of an object. Now the collection is offline and cannot start it at all. I got TF400783 the host <collection name> cannot be started . the host is in the process of being serviced... Any advises how I can upgrade only this collection? Thanks, Jackson

  • Anonymous
    May 28, 2015
    The upgrade failed on one of my project collections due to a space issue (DOH!). After I corrected my silly mistake, I re-ran the failed step from the status tab of the admin console and that seemed to do the trick.

  • Anonymous
    August 26, 2015
    I've had this fail because the ALTER DATABASE statement that changes the recovery model from FULL to SIMPLE failed. Now I have a db I can't use, and our backups are useless because we were backing them up without detaching first (or using the tfsbackup tool / scheduled backup) Frustrating.