I have been wanting to upgrade this site to Drupal 6.x for quite some time. It has morphed from 4.x to 5.x and now 6.x over the last year and 10 months. This site started as an experiment as I tried to work out how Drupal might fit into my previous job and has, I hope, evolved into a place with its own voice.

When I first tried upgrading, I was confronted with a 501 error on the update.php page. I did some googling and found that others have had luck using other browsers to upgrade when getting hit with this issue. I switched from MacOS to XP and tried the upgrade from Explorer and the update got a little further but still ended up in a failure. I imported my database locally using BigDump (a blogpost on this is forthcoming!) and did the upgrade without a hitch. Finally I decided to create a new MySQL DB on my domain, import the upgraded database, and point the D6 files at the new database. That has solved my immediate upgrade issue, but hasn't solved the underlying problem as to WHY the upgrade failed on my domain. I plan on continuing to dig into the why's with my host.

What is normally a relatively rapid process turned into several days of frustration. I did learn a few new tricks and was grateful for the help provided by AjK and alasda. Thanks guys!