Cannot complete this action. Please try again. SharePoint 2007 Default.aspx Problem
February 21, 2011 Leave a comment
A user tried to access their site on a SharePoint 2007 server, but was unfortunately greated with the wonderful, unhelpful message of:
Cannot complete this action. Please try again.
This error occurred when trying to access the default page of the site i.e.: http://Server/subsite/default.aspx
A quick search around the internet and it seems many people have had this same problem at some point, but no one could find a solution that wasn’t as drastic as deleting and creating the site, restoring the server or even trashing and rebuilding SharePoint!! On a live production system, this wasn’t practical and would require a bit of work to sort out!
I run one server which consists of a main site for my project, with sub sites for each team on that project. The problem was occurring for just one team sub site. With a little poking around, I found I could still navigate to all the sites content and its settings, via the parents Content and Structure options – (“Site Actions” –> “Manage Content and Structure”).
Using this navigation option, I went to the master page viewer and tried to upload the master.default page from my fail over server which was working perfectly. This didn’t work and caused a new “File not Found” error when trying to view the home page of the site. I restored the previous version to get back to square one.
With my only option looking to be to restore the subsite from the backup, I tried one last thing. Within the Manage Content and Structure pages, I deleted the Default.aspx file from the problem site. I then copied a default.aspx page from a known working sub site.
On refreshing the problem site, this solution worked fine and I was once again able to navigate to the problem site with no errors.
I am still not sure why the original problem occurred, so if anyone has any ideas I would be most grateful.