Help with SharePoint 2010 Content DB

Here are a few points;

You don't really make a site that points to it, you create a web app that contains it. You can mount the content database with an existing web app, or you can create a new web app to mount the database to. In any case, you need to be able to access the web app before you proceed.

As far as your statement and question, you had one web app with many content databases, mounting this one content database will only allow access to the sites that are within this database, none of the others, so if you truly want to recreate your original farm, you will need all of the content databases. You can of course mount only one content database, but you will only have those site collections available.

You can use the data base with this PowerShell cmdlet;

Mount-SPContentDatabase

Hope that helps...

You don't really make a site that points to it, you create a web app that contains it.

Great to know.

I made a new Web App and mounted the content DB.  When I browse to it I get


I then went to where the old path would be  http://"oldURL"/departments/ce  and I got a generic team site.

Go in to Central Admin and view the site collections within the web app that you mounted the content database in to. You should see the site collections and the URL's. Based on that information you will know that the correct URL should be. Also, the other farm may have some managed paths that the new web app does not have, that would cause errors. The url would be something like this;

New Web App + Managed Path if any + Site Collection name as shown in central admin

http://NewWebApp/ManagedPath/SiteCollectionName/

Also, make sure the account you are using has full permission to the web app, which you can grant in Central Admin. Also the user that the app pools runs as needs access to the content base.

As you can tell, there is a lot going on here, and this is by no means all of it... :-)

Good luck...

Yeah I believe I recreated the managed paths and all that before I did this.  I am pretty sure the username has total and complete access to everything.  I use one username.  Still, it shows up as just a generic new Teamsite.  So no error, just no content from the Content DB.

The mounted content DB is on a different SQL Server instance.  Could that be a problem ?  The reason being when I installed SP standalone it installed a version of SQL that is compatible with the version on our production side.

Any ideas would be appreciated.  I know it is next to impossible to troubleshoot this without being in front of it.

Is this for the purpose of migrating to a new farm or do you just need to recover data from the content database and you will be finished with it?

We have a wacky plan.  SP 2010 original is on an isolated network from our SP 2013 online.  I cannot connect the two, ever.  

So I created a new SP2010 on a new network that CAN access our 2013.  My plan was to transport the Content databases to 2010, then use ShareGate to go from the new 2010 to 2013 online.  This isnt going to work 100% but to us, the documents and metadata with the documents is important, and site structure.  But things like workflows and any Farm solutions can be done without for now.

I wish ShareGate could look at content databases but it works only through the API, they told me this on the phone today.

The last step that made it work was removing custom master pages in Site Setting.  I got to Site Settings by simply pasting "_layouts/settings.aspx" after the path to the new site/web app.  

The other step I did was make the new site, in a new content db, and then overwrite (or name change my imported content DB to match).  I then had to do a "Change site collection administrators" from Central Admin.  I got that idea from SneekCo

Thanks - Glad you got it working.