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How to delete a corrupted Sharepoint list

By peter.stilgoe

Sometime you will find you have a currupted list that you cant delete through the normal way as when you try & access the list or the list settings the webpage throws errors. In this case use STSADM

stsadm.exe -o forcedeletelist -url http://devapp01/Lists/<MyListName>/

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Sharepoint / MOSS / WSS , Sharepoint 2010 , Sharepoint Lists , stsadm

Sharepoint / MOSS / WSS, Sharepoint 2010, Sharepoint Lists, Sharepoint STSADM 2 Comments March 15th, 2011

About... peter.stilgoe

This author published 497 posts in this site.
Sharepoint, InfoPath, K2, Nintex, Business Process Mapping, Business Intelligence, Automation, ECM, Document Management, Document Imaging, Internet Marketing & Online Business Consultant Email / MSN: pstilgoe@hotmail.com LinkedIn: Pete Stilgoe - Sharepoint Consultant

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2 Comments

• At 2012.02.08 16:24, Matthew Lamb said:
  

  We had a problem where the Site Content and Structure view would not open, giving the error “An unexpected error has occured”. By increasing the verbosity of the ULS logs and looking up the Correlation ID we were able to find the GUID of the list which was causing the problem. I then looked up this GUID in the Content Database’s “AllLists” table (column tp_ID) to determine which list was the problem.

  The lists were corrupted but could not be deleted using the above technique. This was returning the useless error message
  “0×80070002″

  We also tried deleting the lists using PowerShell but this returned an error saying “List does not exist. The page you selected contains a list that does not exist. It may have been deleted by another user.”

  Finally we found that the list had previously been deleted and was already appearing in the Recycle Bin, but for some reason was also appearing in its original place in the SharePoint site.

  So we deleted the item from the Site-collection level “Deleted from end user Recycle Bin” view, and the list then disappeared, and the Site Content and Structure view started working again.

  Hope this might help someone!

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  [Reply]
• At 2012.05.10 00:26, Peter Cuttriss said:
  

  Hi Peter,

  Thanks for this, I tried it but it didn’t work for us either. Thank fully I read Matthew’s comment and his recommendation of deleting the list from the second stage recycle bin worked!

  Regards
  Pete

  [Reply]

  [Reply]