Trying to upgrade Confluence from 5.x to 6.15.5 now service won't start

[Adam Ziegler]

I tried upgrading my Windows server to Confluence 6.15.5 and followed the instructions on https://confluence.atlassian.com/doc/upgrading-confluence-4578.html to the letter, but now the damn service refuses to start and I'm completely dead in the water. It says in the instructions

"If you run Confluence as a service on Windows you should delete the existing service then re-install the service by running <install-directory>/bin/service.bat." 

First I ran into a message saying the JAVA_HOME variable wasn't set, which led me down a whole new rabbit hole installing the JDK engine, all of which was NOT in the documentation. Once I got past that, I realized that what the instructions fail to mention is that you don't just run the bat file. You have to pass in a command line variable. What's worse, remove only removes the CURRENT version of the service (referencing tomcat9) not the one I actually need to remove (referencing tomcat6). There is really no way to remove it, other than go into the registry, which I did. Now while I was able run the batch file with "success" it doesn't matter because the new service won't run either. I get this in the event viewer:

The Atlassian Confluence Confluence010612213423 service terminated with the following service-specific error:
The system cannot open the file.

The ONLY reason I was even attempting the upgrade is because I wanted to get the Wiki off my server and onto the hosted system, but was too far back to be able to use the tool for that. It's a great wiki once it is up and running, but clunky as f&%^ to get installed right and working. 

[Adam Ziegler · Accepted solution]

Shannon. Steve called and we got it squared away....mostly. It turns out you don't need the service to get into Confluence. When I restored from my backup, I did not delete the upgraded version, so that caused some problems, but by deleting the home and installation folder, then restoring from the backup, I still wasn't able to get the service to start but I was able to use the start-confluence batch file to get into it. Since I am migrating to the cloud, this was enough!

[Shannon S]

Adam,

Thank you for letting us know how you were able to resolve the issue! I'm sure also that you've seen the Cloud Migration tool, but if you have not, you can have a look here, at the Cloud Migration Center.

Take care,

Shannon

[Shannon S]

Hello Adam,

Thank you for contacting us. I see that as you weren't able to get a resolution on Community that you have since raised a support ticket for this. That's probably for the best since we can obtain your server logs in the support queue, which we would need to help solve the issue.

Could you please just follow-up with us here when you are able to resolve the issue? It will help to know how you end up resolving it, in case other users have the same problem.

Thank you!

Regards,

Shannon