Domino upgrade to V14, a consideration

I was asked by a friend, who is mostly a developer and not a Domino Admin about upgrading his dev server from V12 to V14.
He told me that he uninstalled V12 and installed V14 but then the Domino server would start in setup mode.

The reason in simple, but if you were not part of the V14 beta program you may have missed it.

In Domino 14 the notes.ini file is not anymore in the program directory, but in the data directory.

In the beta program forum there were different opinions on this move, not everyone believes is a good idea, but anyway it is what it is.

So what happened to my friend ? The uninstaller left a copy of notes.ini in the Domino program directory and when he ran the V14 installer he noticed that that file was renamed notes.ini.old. There is now a new notes.ini in the Domino data directory, but is an “empty” notes.ini, i.e. it contains only the first 6 or 7 lines, so when the server starts, it goes in setup mode.
[Notes]
NotesProgram=C:\Program Files\HCL\Domino
Directory=C:\Program Files\HCL\Domino\Data
KitType=2
InstallType=2
PartitionNumber=1
showControllerStatusWindow=0
ServiceName=HCLDominoServer(CProgramFilesHCLDominoData)

How to solve this?

The solution is easy, edit the notes.ini.old file in the program directory and copy everything below the line FaultRecovery_Build=Release 12.0.2FP2 (or whatever is the version you are upgrading from).
Then copy it in the notes.ini in the data dir just below the line FaultRecovery_Build=Release 14.0
If there are those lines:
CFP_LP_PREV=Release 12.0.2|November 03, 2022
CFP_LP_BASE_VERSION=Release 12.0.2|November 03, 2022
CFP_LP_CURRENT=Release 12.0.2FP2|July 12, 2023
delete them.

Now restart your V14 server and it will not go in setup mode anymore.

Note that if you do NOT uninstall the V12 server, but just run the V14 installer on top of your existing installation, the installer will take care of everything and it will create the correct notes.ini in the data directory with all the values from the V12 one.

You should use the option of uninstalling only if you are upgrading a server that is pre-V9.0.1