I'm doing a trial upgrade of a system which is a bit of a nightmare.

I'm going from 6.1 to 7.3 and the initial server is Windows 2000 with SQL 2005 and the target server is Windows 2012 with SQL 2014

Aside from the usual problems, I have a couple of problems. The source database has its collation set to SQL_Latin1_General_CP1_CI_AS which causes problems going from 6.2 to 7.0. Changing the collation is a living nightmare from the scripts I've seen on the Internet. Any thoughts? I have got to v7.0 but I now can't login because I get the ever usless error message:

"You may need to recreate views manually"

In the logs I get this:

Dec 16 2015 11:54:53.928 3388 3728 1 SQLError : Cannot resolve the collation conflict between "Latin1_General_CI_AS" and "SQL_Latin1_General_CP1_CI_AS" in the equal to operation (SELECT st.name AS DBColType, sc.length AS DBColLength, sc.name AS DBColName, so.name AS DBTableName, sc.xprec AS DBPrecision, Bord_TableID as tableId FROM syscolumns sc, sysobjects so, systypes st, Custom_Tables WHERE sc.id = so.id AND sc.xusertype = st.xusertype AND so.name = Bord_Name AND Bord_DatabaseID IS NULL ORDER BY so.name, sc.name
)

I have altered the collation on Custom_Tables so I'm not sure why I have a problem now. Any thoughts?

The other problem is the datatype change from nchar to nvarchar and ntext to nvarchar(max)

Has anyone created a script that alters the columns in CRM so they are nvarchar and nvarchar(max)? I can write a script to do it, but it will do ALL of them and even on a vanilla 7.3 I can see some nchars in there still. Have these been deliberately left, or just forgotten?

Why can't the installer make the change?