My company is preparing to move from SPS 2003 to MOSS 2007. As part of our upgrade we would like to rework the structure of the site. We currently have a several sites which exist as subsites after the upgrade and we would like to turn them into site collections (http://intranet/topics/divisions/humanresources as an example is a subsite and we want to move it to http://intranet/hr (a managed path we created) and have it now be a site collection rather than a subsite). To do this we created a new managed path (/hr) and then using stsadm created a blank site collection (no template defined). I then exported the existing site using stsadm (stsadm -o export) and then imported to the new location (stsadm -o import). Is this the right way to do this? I received numerous errors during the export and import (the export mainly complained about web part or web form control not being found or not being registered as safe whenever it hit any of the document library aspx files - the import gave many more errors including some about not being able to submit a survey response more than once (so it was adding the items as my logged in account rather than the original submitter)). After the export completed I was not able to load the page for the site collection - I got a 404 on the default.aspx page (even though I could go into the site settings for the site collection and view content and see that the page did actually exist in the pages library and that the permissions were set correctly). I'm at a loss as to how to do this correctly and moving these sites around is a critical part of our upgrade - any help would be greatly appreciated. I can provide both the import and export logs if anyone needs more information.

There's been several updates to the code above since I originally made this post. For the latest version download my custom extensions from here: http://stsadm.blogspot.com/2007/09/convert-sub-site-to-site-collection.html

Very Informative...Thanks.san