Florian @

This farm is configured with two separate servers: one web/application server and one sql server..

1. Using the SharePoint Central Admin, make a full backup the whole farm.
2. Start the SharePoint Products and Technologies Configuration Wizard and disconnect the web server from the farm
3. Using the SharePoint Products and Technologies Configuration Wizard define a new farm in the SQL server, that creates a new configuration database
4. (Updated) Using the SharePoint Central Admin restore the full backup in your new farm, running it twice. Select New configuration to be able to change the Database name.
   1. Restore first the content database
   2. Restore the SSP and its content

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A few things which you should be aware when you follow this explanation:

• step 2 of course detach your sharepoint webserver from your farm and of course every configuration which you made in the IIS / filesystem will be lost (like configurations in the web.config, usercontrols directory for smartpart and so on... )
• in our case we had more virtual servers on this machine all runing on port 80 with different host-headers and the restoring tool in step 4 unfortunatley didn't like this :-(... for the first hostheader it worked and then the restoring always told that there is already a server runing on port 80... our luck that we did this on a sunday evening and had time to recreate the sharepoints and restored the stsadm backups and of course rebuild the SSP....

good luck :)