Several years ago, our web developer quit, and we didn't replace him. Now I'm sitting on a Drupal 6 installation that I can't upgrade. After three failed manual attempts, I installed Drush (I've tried both 6 and 8). When I try to upgrade with Drush it tells me that drupal6-eol is corrupt. I found the place where it checks the MD5 hashes, and disabled that only to get more error messages about Drupal 6 being out of date. Then I tried installing Ubuntu 11.10, installing Drupal 6 from the repositories (had to modify my sources.list to point to the URL for EOL Ubuntu versions). Then I release-upgraded all the way to 16.04 LTS thinking that Ubuntu would do it for me. No such luck. I even tried installing Drupal 7, and then dropping my Druapl 6 files on top. That obviously did not work.

Is there a way to get around the Drush errors? If not then what options are left?

Comments

onejam’s picture

Have you tried:

drush pm-update projects drupal-6.38

Anyway, Drupal 6 is no longer supported. This is probably why you are getting the error. However, i'm surprised you cannot manually upgrade to the last known version which is version 6.38. To manually update the site, see: https://www.drupal.org/node/390448

If you are already running this version then you have the latest version but still have security flaws. So your option is to go with https://www.mydropwizard.com/drupal-6-lts or upgrade to Drupal 7 (which means rebuilding the site as there are no upgrade path).

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toby.richards@slo.courts.ca.gov’s picture

Are you saying that I cannot upgrade from 6 to 7 because 6 is end of life? I tried drush pm-update. That's when I get the drupal6-eol is corrupt error. To be clear, I'm on 6.38. I want to go to 7.x.

onejam’s picture

Ok i see, you are trying to upgrade 6 --> 7 (not a minor upgrade, ie 6.x --> 6.x).

Drupal 6.38 is the latest last version of Drupal 6. So you are already on the latest version.

It has always been Drupal's policy to not be backwards compatible with the major versions. So any newer major version will break compatibility from an older version. This means you cannot just upgrade to the next major version, ie from D6 --> D7 --> D8. So you will need to rebuild the complete site on a newer major version. You might be able to migrate your content but you will still need to rebuild the complete site.

Drush cannot be used to upgrade to a major version.

i know, it's annoying but upgrading from D6 to D7 isn't so bad, until you get to Drupal 8. That is a real pain...

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toby.richards@slo.courts.ca.gov’s picture

I wouldn't mind building Drupal 7 or 8 from scratch if I can migrate the data. How do I migrate the data? I did google it, but I didn't find anything helpful. If you could point me to a document then that would be great.

onejam’s picture

This might help (D6 --> D7): https://smbjorklund.no/how-migrate-content-drupal-6-7-using-migrated2d-p...

If you want migrate to D8:

https://www.drupal.org/docs/8/upgrade/brief-overview-and-history-of-auto...

But before you attempt to upgrade to D8, double check if all your contrib modules are available for Drupal 8.

Good luck,

P.S Backdrop is the easiest to upgrade, imo. No need for any migration path. https://backdropcms.org/

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We build engaging websites and intuitive designs that will benefit your business.
Duvien

onejam’s picture

Come think of it, when i upgraded D6 - D7, i was able to just replace all the core files and run update.php. Then, replace all the contrib modules with D7 version and run update.php. This upgrade both files and DB. But i had to rebuild the theme ground up. It's been ages go since i upgraded my site...

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We build engaging websites and intuitive designs that will benefit your business.
Duvien

toby.richards@slo.courts.ca.gov’s picture

I might try that. The instructions you gave me seem to assume that you know php, and what things like forms and taxonomy are. I only know very, very basic PHP, and don't understand all the Drupal terminology.

VM’s picture

migrating the data will depend on the complexity of the site and what modules were utilized for your build.