Thank you both for the responses.
To clarify the changes to the web.config: my local copy of the site is created from a copy of the production site - I have to change the connection string to get it to work. In this case I also had to change autoupgrade from TRUE to FALSE - because that was what the wiki instructions said to do. Since the upgrade isn't working I wonder if that was really needed.
Unzipping the upgrade to a separate file and copying it over from there is also what the wiki said to do. The wiki says specifically (as step 11, actually):
-
Extract
the contents of the UPGRADE package into a folder on your computer,
it is not recommended that you extract directly over your website.
I have to admit I'm concerned about the possibility that Win7 copy here actually copied the entire folders from the upgrade instead of simply replacing all the files; but that may just be paranoia.
Michael Tobisch, can you explain this: start the web site,
enter your host name and password and let it run. I've never had to log into my sites as host to make an upgrade run, and this isn't in the upgrade instructions, which just say to browse to the site and then replace the URL with the string: http://MYWEBSITE/install/install.aspx?mode=upgrade
I'm clearly going to have to start this over. But I would ask both of you to review the upgrade instructions in the wiki and see if you think they're justified. These instructions (steps 6-8) concern me:
-
Configure
IIS for a new website with a host header for upgrade.dnndocs.net
-
Setup
Permissions on the file system
-
Restore
the database to a NEW database name.
If these are really required, it may be impossible for me to upgrade my production site, because I'm on a shared Windows site and I don't have access to the IIS config the way I do on my laptop. I'm also not absolutely sure my DNN4Less hosting license allows more than one DNN database (we have the lowest level license, I'll have to check that). And while the new database and new host header are clearly a very cautious approach, in the real world I've never been able to be that cautious and so far all my upgrades have worked even though I just replaced everything on the current site and then ran the wizard.