IIS7 - Change physical path of all sites in server config

Question

I've been trying to migrate an IIS7 webserver (rather large one), and so far am appalled by the state of msdeploy and using it for what I need to do. Enough on that, here's my current problem:

The server I'm migrating from has all the sites on a D:\ drive. It isn't possible for us to have a D:\ drive in the new environment, so I need to change all the site paths to C:\. I obviously do not want to do this for each site manually, so I thought to edit the paths in applicationHost.config. However, IIS doesn't seem to care one bit. All the paths are C:\, yet IIS still tries to reference D:\. When I look at site settings, it still says D:\. Where in the world is this value coming from?

It's on a 64-bit server, and I checked the OTHER applicationHost.config in \syswow64\, and that has magically changed to C:\ as well.

How can I do this?

Answer 1

There should be a relatively simple using the correct syntax in MSDeploy.

Better than trying to explain all of the ins-and-outs of the process here, I'd recommend reading this thread at iis.net

Make sure you go through the whole thread before starting a migration.

Answer 2

"Fixed" it by copying applicationhost.config to a 2003 box, editing it there and copying back. Apparently 2008 "pretends" to save your file (i.e. it shows my changes when I open it in notepad) but read them from, either some cached version, or from another file elsewher