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
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 3b will start a background process that removes old repository entries. I wait for it to finish then stopped Alfresco 3b.
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: