Saturday, March 21, 2009

IIS Restore Invalid Signature

If you are trying to restore IIS and receive an Invalid Signature error trying to restore the IIS Metabase you must make a small tweak to ensure you can restore the IIS Metabase to another windows server. What probably happened is that you created a backup to the c:\windows\system\inetsrv folder and copied it to the new server and tried to restore IIS but you get Invalid Signature. The problem is that you didn't set a password so the backup is not portable. So simply redo your work. Create a new backup of the IIS Metabase and choose the option to "Encrypt Backup Using Password" and assign it a password. Then recopy the backup configurtion to the new server in the c:\windows\system32\inersrv folder. Then retry to restore IIS and point to your copied backup files. This time it will ask for a password and will restore IIS successfully.