The server hosting WSUS had a catastrophic failure and we have had to rebuild the system drives. Luckily the DB and content store for WSUS are on a seperate drive so were unaffected. During the rebuild process we thought it was time to update the server to 2008 R2 (from 2003 R2).
Have got the server running and installed the WSUS role, detached the DB form SQL Express 2008 R2 and attached the original. Carried out the wsusutil.exe movecontent command with a -skipcopy switch pointing to the original content store. All looked good until I saw the front page stating it is trying to download files for 6,436 updates at around 344,565 MB!!!!!!
Oops, I thought, something not right here. The content store I have on disk is only 75GB but I am thinking that some vital step has been missed in the restoration process. Either way is there a way to make WSUS reindex its local content store or something as I am unsure that downloading 344 gigabytes is a viable way forward!
EDIT: Never rains but it pours. AM now getting a CLSID: FX {8b6499ed-0241-e032-6508-da4b1c879d7e} error could not create snap in. think a reinstall of WSUS is in order.
Best Answer
So the process for this was a touch convoluted but it worked in the end.
Had to do an in-place upgrade to repair the MMC
Then I was able to deploy WSUS and IIS again
Reattached the database and pointed WSUS to it
Moved the content store with -skipcopy
Spent an age fiddling with SQL permissions and NTFS permissions to the directory where the database was stored.
Ran the WSUSMaintenance SQL script
It then only downloaded 80GB instead of 300+GB so could live with that. Not perfect but got there in the end :)