SharePoint 2007 - Cannot Find Web Part Page

Question

Situation: Using stsadm -o enumallwebs -includewebparts returns a list of webparts. One of which I want to remove across the entire site.

Issue: Using the GUID I can find the webpart Page ID, and then look up the location and page name in the AllDocs table. So far so good. Except: The page is missing! It has been deleted.

How do I: Get the Page back so that I can remove the WebPart? As it will always remain in the stsadm -o enumallwebs -includewebparts results.

Migration to 2010: Will this be an issue when I migrate to SharePoint 2010? Which is why I'm 'cleaning up' the site in the first place.

Many thanks in advance! I hope that someone has run into this problem before and has a simple solution.

Answer 1

So, the solution was to simply delete the offending rows in the AllDocs table. I was afraid of doing this in case something went wrong, so I did a backup first! Then researched the AllDocs table a bit more and found a blog were this was explained. Now all is well :-) Thanks to SPDoctor for taking the time to comment.

Thanks Dave

Answer 2

You are doing the right thing in trying to clean up your farm before migrating to SharePoint 2010. This will save you much heartache later on.

When content is deleted it is not necessarily removed immediately and may depend on timer jobs to clean up content that has been flagged for deletion. The other possibility is that the pages or sites have become "orphaned" in that they exist in the content db but nothing links to them. There are a few stsadm commands to deal with these issues:

stsadm -o databaserepair -deletecorruption -databasename WSS_Content -url http://portal.mycorp.local/

also:

stsadm -o forcedeletelist

stsadm -o deletesite -force

These are powerful commands - make sure you take a backup before running them, just in case.