I created a site collection but want to delete it. I get 'Can not reach the Messages.xml file!' when attempting deletion via the Central Administration site OR stsadm -o deletesite -url http://siteurl. Does anyone have a suggestion on how I might mitigate this issue? I have a development server that by default uses our development domain. I created the site collection (unwittingly) with the development domain which I don't acutally know the password for. I can get one, if absolutely necessary, but I'd like to just delete the site collection and move on. I even signed in as the system account thinking that I could not reach the file due to permissions problems. This did not help. Thank you!

Hi Kellie, You can run the following command to determine which site collection is an orphan. stsadm -o enumallwebs -databasename DS_Database From the output, check the InSiteMap parameter: InSiteMap: True if the site collection is accessible; False if the site collection is an orphan. Then you can run stsadm -o deletesite command with a -force parameter to delete site collections and sites, based on their IDs, that are not registered in the SharePoint site map. For example: stsadm -o deletesite -force -siteid e2a114b8-80c9-41f6-87bf-3feddf2ad9b6 -databaseserver DS1 -databasename DB1 Note: replace the parameters after databasename and databaseserver with your exact name. SharePoint Orphans Explained http://blogs.technet.com/corybu/archive/2007/05/31/sharepoint-orphans-explained.aspx Hope this is helpful to you. Rock WangRock Wang MSFT