Diagnosing the Problem – Corrupted Databases and Orphaned Sites

Overview

I ran into an issue the other day where the target site was corrupted during a publishing attempt.  The target was a newly created blank site, and after the publishing attempt the target site was inaccessible from the Web Browser, Central Admin and the command line.  We tried to delete the target from all three interfaces without success.  We could not create a new site or delete the old site without an error message that said something like “cannot process the request”. 

Steps to Resolution

To resolve this issue from the command line examine the database with STSADM database repair command.  For the command you will need both the database name and the url.  If you don’t keep track of which URLs are in which database you should.  You can search the Webs table in your content databases for the site info, but preparing a good report ahead of time is always welcome.  After the site is corrupted you may not be able to access this information from Central Administration.

When you run the stsadm –o databaserepair command (http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc263282.aspx) you should see output like this.  Each orphaned item in the site collection is reported on. 

Use the –DeleteCorruption parameter to fix the database and then remove and readd the content database in SharePoint to resolve the issue.