I've had some trouble updating Alfresco from version 2.9 to 3.2. It seems that going from 2.9 to 3.2 directly is not supported. So here is what I did:

1. I set up an Alfresco 3b system and let it point to the old 2.9 data directory and database (I took 3b because I had the war available, 3Final is liable to work as well)
2. when 3b is started it will update the db schema and run some patches. This can take quite a lot of time depending on the contents and size of the repository. After applying patch 7 out of 10 or so, Alfresco stopped with an error. I started 3b again and it successfully finished applying the patches.
3. after running one minute the versionStoreMigrationCleanupJob is started in background. This job removes old entries from the version store. I had quite a lot of them so I wait for it to finish then stopped Alfresco.
4. I set up Alfresco 3.2 and let it point to the data directory and database.
5. Alfresco 3.2 didn't start up with the lucene-indexes created by 3b. There was some read-past-eof-error when accessing the indexes. Therefore I removed the indexes and set index.recovery.mode=FULL
6. Starting up 3.2 updated the repository successfully.

Sebastian Lorenz, 04.08.2009 13:36: