Wednesday, March 17, 2010

SharePoint Error for One User - The File Exists

Today had an interesting support issue to investigate. Of all the users on a SharePoint intranet, one person was unable to upload documents - each attempt to upload a document to a document library resulted in the "Access Denied" page. And the ULS log revealed little of value even in verbose mode.

The other strange thing was that this user is configured as the site collection owner, and was able to create document libraries fine. But then could not add a document to the document library he had just created!

Finally got some clues when I removed that account from the site owner SharePoint group (just in case that group was causing the behaviour). When I tried to add the account back to that group, an error page displayed with the useful(?) message "The file exists (Exception from HRESULT: 0x80070050)". At least that helped to confirm that the issue was in the user account.

A bit of research revealed this post on the subject - seems likely that the SID for the account has changed at some point. The described fix is to modify the SID in one of the SharePoint database tables. That's a bit of a worry, given that fiddling with the database content is like confusing a Kiwi accent for an Australian - to be avoided. But it may be the only approach available. Let me know if you try it out and it works for ya.

2 comments:

Reed said...

You should actually use the stsadm -o migrateuser command to fix this.

Reed said...

Just stumbled across this post... you should actually use the stsadm command "migrateuser" to fix this.