When you upgrade to Noah System 4.8, the Noah database is updated to SQL Server Compact 4.0 from version 3.5 during the installation. To go back to an earlier version of Noah we need to get back to the earlier, 3.5 version, of the database.

If you uninstall Noah 4.8 and reinstall an earlier version of Noah, without taking extra steps, you will get an error 50138 after logging into Noah.

The Noah 4.8 installation creates backups of the Noah database files before it updates them. To use these backed up files to launch the earlier version of Noah, follow the steps below:

1. Cancel out of the 50138 error message.

2. Stop the Noah Server service and Noah Client service.

3. Navigate to C:\Program Files (x86)\Common Files\HIMSA Shared.

4. Locate the Noah database files, right click, and rename the files:

  • rename the NOAHCfgDatabase.sdf to NOAHCfgDatabase.old
  • rename the NOAHDatabaseCoreSqlCompact.sdf to NOAHDatabaseCoreSqlCompact.old 

5. Locate the backups of the database files that were created during the Noah 4.8 installation. The files are called:

  • NoahDatabaseCoreSqlCompact.sdf.preupgrade
  • NoahCfgDatabase.sdf.preupgrade

6. Right click and rename the files to remove the ‘preupgrade’. The database files will then be named:

  • NoahDatabaseCoreSqlCompact.sdf
  • NoahCfgDatabase.sdf

7. Restart the Noah Server Service and the Noah Client services.

8. Launch Noah