Remove Service Desk to Reinstall

[Daniel Cox]

We recently upgraded our Jira from a version 6 with service desk 2 to the latest (jira 7.11 and service desk 3.14) 
During that upgrade the service desk module was left disabled as we didn't use it previously (it was evaluated and we gave it a test then deleted the test and never used it again).

I have been trying to get the service desk upgraded but after installing the latest i get errors when trying to make a new service desk project.

Tracking these errors down it seems an upgrade step was missed and we needed to upgrade to service desk 3.0. first then 3.1. 

Is there anyway I can remove service desk entirely and start again ? 
We have no data (that we want) in the system for service desk. 

Obviously we need to preserve the other projects we have but im happy to do whatever leg work i need to to get this done.

I did see someone suggest downgrade jira to 7.0 again  and install service desk 3.0 then upgrade both back to the latest but the route to do that seems risky and there must be better way for an application like this?

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

[Andy Heinzer · Accepted solution]

There really is not a better way to upgrade that Service Desk data in these versions.  You really do need to revert Jira to a 7.0.x or a 7.1.x version, and then install a compatible Service Desk version to that version of Jira in order to upgrade your data.

It is unfortunate that this upgrade requirement exists, but we have tried to better document this in pages like Skipping major versions when upgrading jira.  

If you had Service Desk data you needed to maintain, then I would recommend following the steps in the KB https://confluence.atlassian.com/jirakb/after-upgrading-to-jira-service-desk-3-2-x-or-greater-service-desk-project-s-navigation-bar-shows-unable-to-render-element-due-to-an-error-845943102.html

However since you have mentioned that you didn't really use Service Desk and that it was disabled in your previous versions, it might be better/easier for you to try to remove the database tables associated with Service Desk entirely.   This is not an officially supported set of steps to follow, so I would strongly recommend that you create a backup of your database before you try this and use a staging server to test this out before you do this in a production instance.

But if you're still interested, check out the customer comments on https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/JSDSERVER-4732

In those comments other admins have posted back with a listing of the specific AO tables that you could drop from your Jira database as a means to completely remove the old Service Desk data that can't be upgraded without going to a 3.0.x version of Service Desk first.

[Daniel Cox]

This worked perfectly thank you!

I ended up dropping the tables (I had to truncate the tables i was about to drop first as there was still some old data in there). 
I would suggest to anyone doing this, 100% double check  you have a backup first. 
It would be very easy to make a mistake doing it this way.

Once all that was complete I reinstalled through the admin section and it worked like a charm.

Thanks for your help.

[Andy Heinzer]

Thanks for letting us know the steps you took here.  Glad to hear things are working now.

[Daniel Cox]

Thank you I will give this a go and see what happens. 
I have about 5 backups of our database in various stages so potentially I could roll back to 7.0 but we would lose some of the newer issues logged so id like to avoid that if possible. 

As I say I will give this a go and let you know the outcome.

Cheers,
Dan