Aborted due to internal error while preupgradecheck

This seems to be a common error while preupgradecheck command runs in SharePoint server. Most of the time, we don’t get an insight from preupgradecheck generated html report, but looking at preupgradecheck logs will give us some idea as what is going on behind the process.

I encountered the same error “Aborted due to internal error” for InvalidDatabaseSchema while running the pre upgrade and the logs have given some idea to proceed towards fixing the errors. I tried finding with ‘InvalidDatabaseSchema’ in the logs which says checking schemas in content database <Database name>… and immediately after this step, there was an error with [SPObjectProcessor] which indicates as below

An unexpected error occured while processing a health analysis rule. This rule will be skipped. The following message was generated by the error: System.Reflection.TargetInvocationException: Exception has been thrown by the target of an invocation. ---> System.Data.SqlClient.SqlException: CREATE DATABASE permission denied in database 'master'

This was apparently indicates that the problem is somewhere with the permissions. Then I tried getting the db_owner and security admin roles for my SharePoint farm account on SQL Server followed by running the pre upgrade check once again. Still getting the same error but this time, I did notice that the content database for ‘InvalidDatabaseSchema’ step in the logs was from Secondary SQL server. I then tried getting the same server roles on Secondary SQL server as well, followed by preupgradecheck once again; Surprised to see that the error ‘Aborted due to internal error’ is gone and Invalid Database Schema is passed.

Please note, if you have multiple SQL Servers in the farm, them ensure you have Security admin and db creator server roles on all the SQL servers before running the preupgradecheck.

If you see the same error, then try following the above and see the error goes away.