Workaround to resolve Microsoft Project Server 2013 upgrade error “An Unknown error occured while performing Action - MODIFY FILE failed. Specified size is less than or equal to current size.”

If you are upgrading Microsoft SharePoint 2010 Project Server to 2013, one of the steps is to consolidate the MPS instance databases. You might get the following error during the upgrade.

“An Unknown error occured while performing Action -  MODIFY  FILE failed. Specified size is less than or equal to current size.”

The command we run is to consolidate the MPS instance databases as listed below.

Convertto-SPProjectDatabase –WebApplication $selectedWebApp –Dbserver $cfg.MPSInstances.Server.MPSInstance –ArchiveDbname $mpsWebInstance.Archive.DatabaseName –DraftDbname $mpsWebInstance.Draft.DatabaseName –PublishedDbname $mpsWebInstance.Publishing.DatabaseName –ReportingDbname $mpsWebInstance.Reporting.DatabaseName –ProjectServiceDbname $mpsWebInstance.ConsolidatedDBName -Confirm:$false; 

After decompile Microsoft SharePoint API behind the powershell, it seems like the Convertto-SPProjectDatabase is trying to increase the database file size to 72 MB during the MPS database consolidation. If your database file size is already larger than that, it will fail and throw the error above.

 

While we are working with Microsoft to address this issue, the quick workaround we used is to alter the database file size to be smaller than 72M so then the upgrade script could change it to 72 MB. We altered the database file size back to 100M as our DB standard.