Failed RMS promotion

Last week, at a customer site, I needed to promote an MS server to RMS, in order to reuse the old RMS and the main SCOM 2012 server.
It is supposed to be a simple procedure, but, famous last words... (Oh, boy, I'm so glad all that RMS/MS went away with 2012).
The customer had the RMS, 3 MS and 3 gateway servers. The environment, although complex enough, is not being used too heavily, but I still took all the needed precautionary actions: DB backups, MP backups, etc.
 
So, here we go for the actual command:
C:\Program Files\System Center Operations Manager 2007>ManagementServerConfigTool.exe PromoteRMS /DeleteExistingRMS:True
 
Everything going ok, till:
Adjusting DW old RMS: ROOTMANAGEMENTSERVER.domain.tld new RMS: MANAGEMENTSERVER.domain.tld
Index was out of range. Must be non-negative and less than the size of the collection.
Parameter name: index.
Well, after recovering from the shock, I start to check the current state of things.
The old MS (RMS to be ) be shows as being the RMS now. Ok.
Services in the new RMS, not all started. Services at the old RMS, all started. Not good.
Since this environment is not fully operational and not heavily used (and I was not feeling like restoring the DB), I decided to dig a bit more.
So, I first fixed the services. Stopped and the services in the old RMS and started them in the new RMS. Looking good.
Then I noticed the 2 other management servers were grayed out. Not good. Why? They were still trying to talk to the old RMS. I then went straight to the registry and changed some keys (basically looked up the old RMS name). No luck after the restart.. Then I've found up the article on how to change the gateway server primary server and followed the same procedure (http://blogs.technet.com/b/operationsmgr/archive/2009/05/22/opsmgr-2007-how-to-configure-a-gateway-to-communicate-with-a-different-management-server-without-moving-agents.aspx), not exactly expecting it would work, since one would think that an MS would be more complicated than a gateway. Well, it did the trick. After I renamed the Health Service State  the MS went back to green and so did its agents.
The gateways themselves had to be fixed, but that was expected.
After that, I've configured what was left to be configured (Reporting) according to this article and I'm back in business. http://scomskills.com/blog/?p=59
I think that if this was a heavily used (real) production environment, I wouldn't proceed exactly like this, but it was good learning.
Hope it helps,

 

Jose Fehse