Per Harald Kristensen recently sent us an email with some tips on how he managed to upgrade a Norwegian installation of Windows SharePoint Services 2.0.
The problem went like this. Mr. Kristensen had a native Norwegian version of WSS 2 (plus sp2) installed with no language packs. When the time for an upgrade came he downloaded the Norwegian version of WSS 3 and attempted to perform a gradual upgrade. Imagine his surprise when the EULA came up in English and a new tab appeared giving him the option of installing SharePoint Services in English or Norwegian!
No matter which option he chose the installation was interrupted with an error:
"This product cannot be installed on a machine with a different language of Windows SharePoint Services 2.0 installed."
Per attempted to work around the problem by downloading the English version of WSS 3 with the Norwegian language pack, but met with similar problems until he finally came up with a solution. Once he had an answer he generously shared it with us in hopes that we would be able to make it more available to the SharePoint Community.
The solution was to run the installation executable (SharePoint.exe) with the “/extract:<path>” option and then run “setup.exe” from the extracted files.
With this approach the EULA showed up in Norwegian and everything else looked and behaved as described in the documentation.
I hope this tip is useful to members of the SharePoint Community, and on their behalf I would like to thank Mr. Kristensen for his efforts in writing up this solution.
If you have a solution you would like to share with us please feel free to email it to help@sharepoint911.com.