Monthly Archives: September 2013

ShareGate Can’t open a website – IN-017-006 The requested list or document library cannot be found. It may have been deleted.

I’ve run into this error a few times in ShareGate-

You try to open a Site Collection or web, and see this:

IN-017-006

SharePoint Designer is not much help either:

SPD

The solution, after much trial and error, was actually pretty simple!

But before I get to the solution, lets look at some things I tried that led me to the solution…

I searched the term “there are no items to show in this view” for SharePoint Designer on the internet.  This turned up a few possibilities – one being a corrupt /_vti_bin/Listdata.svc.

That wasn’t the case for me- some webs from the same site collection worked just fine – it was just one specific web that did not.

The other thing that turned up was the possibility of a corrupt list.  Often due to a missing feature needed by the list.

I turned to PowerShell and ran the following commands:

$web = get-spweb http://my.url.com/sites/mynoncooperatingweb
$web.lists

This started to return results, then errored out –

I was definitely on to something – there was something wrong with one of my lists.

Next I needed to figure out which one.

There are a few ways to do this – the easiest would likely have been to go to the website and choose “Site Actions”->”View all site content” and then just click on each one.

I didn’t do that.

Instead I mucked with PowerShell some more, I was able to tell from the error when I ran my above code which list was causing the problem.

My next step was to see if there was any data in the list.

Based on “Site Actions”->”View all site content” , it had an item count of zero, but I wasn’t sure I could trust this given the list was corrupt.

So I turned to SQL – I knew which Database it was in. (Get-SPContentDatabase -site $url will tell you this)

Select Top 1000 *
  From AllDocs
  Where 
     DirName like 'url/to/my/corrupt/document/library/%'
     Order By Dirname

This listed a few results,  but the results looked like what is usually found in the Forms folder – I didn’t for example, see anything at all that looked like end user data  or documentation.

Armed with this re-assurance that the list was not needed, it seemed the easiest way forward was just to delete the list – this would be easy – or so I thought….

I didn’t have any hopes of deleting the list through the UI, (though to be clear, it did show up under “Site Actions”->”View all site content” and clicking on that threw an error)

So I again turned to PowerShell:

I saw a delete method, so I called it without the ( ) to see what it was looking for, It needed a GUID.

I ran the command shown below to get a list of ID’s from my site – in my case, the second list was the corrupt one.

Then I put that guid in the delete function as shown: and got the error as shown:

powershell_delete_list

“List does not exists”

So that didn’t work.

Next I searched the internet for more information –

I found a post that mentioned the recycle bin. Ah Ha!

I looked at “Site Actions”->”View all site content” and then the recycle bin, which of course was empty.

So I went to Site Actions -> Site Settings -> then went to “Go To Top Level Site Settings” -> then  Site Collection Administration(heading) ->Recycle Bin.

After sorting by URL, I found the corrupt list there.

First I tried restoring the list, it threw an error.

Then I tried to delete the list – that worked, and put the item in the Second stage recycle bin.

Next I went to the 2nd Stage “Deleted from end user Recycle Bin” area and deleted it from there.

Back in Site actions -> “View all site content” the list no longer showed up.

I relaunched SharePoint Designer and I am again able to bring up the list of lists and libraries.

I again tried a migration in ShareGate and it’s purring along like a kitten.

So to make my long story short, the error in ShareGate was caused by a corrupt/broken list – this same error affected SharePoint Designer (they both presumably use the same web service interface to get information from SharePoint) and to a degree, it even affected looking at the lists in PowerShell.

I suspect there is a bug somewhere, but I suppose it’s possible the user hit delete at the exact instance the application pool restarted or something like that.

At the time this happened we were running  SP2010 SP1 + June 2011 CU – if you run across a similar situation, please leave a comment with your version of SharePoint, hopefully this is addressed in SP2!

– Jack

I’m Presenting at SharePoint Fest Chicago on October 7th

On October 7th, I’m teaming up with Michael Blumenthal to give a half day workshop on using PowerShell with SharePoint.  Michael’s got some great material and between the two of us you should walk away with a firm introduction as well as a walk through on a few of the more useful scripts from this site.

The Workshops are optional and are the day before the official conference begins (Workshops are on Monday, Conference is Tuesday and Wednesday)  Although there is an extra cost for the workshops, I think you get more for your money on workshop day as the sessions benefit in 2 big ways:

  • Workshops are Longer – basically a half day vs 1 hour sessions during the conference.
  • Workshops are more intimate – where there might be 100 people in a 1 hour session, expected attendance for workshop sessions is typically half that.

I hope to see you there!

http://www.sharepointfest.com/Chicago/

UPDATE: the presentation, scripts and handout PDF are available for download here: SPFestHandout.zip