• My Central Admin was gone
• All SharePoint sites were gone (also checking in IIS)

That may be a real shocker. One option is to simply rerun config wizard to have the Central admin site and restore entire farm from backup (you DO have backup, do you?). Otherwise here’s the process on how I recovered all the sites:

Re-run SharePoint Products and Technologies Configuration Wizard

1. Run the SharePoint Products and Technologies Configuration Wizard
2. Rejoin the existing farm (entering database server and configuration database and farm passphrase of your lost SharePoint farm) – thank God these aren’t deleted
3. Central admin site has to be recreated

After the configuration wizard has finished you should see all your web applications back in IIS

Remake manual changes to web.config files

If you were making manual changes (not through SharePoint Object Model) to web.config files of your web applications, these are lost, so you better keep track and remake those changes.

Restart services

Event though you may have your sites back there is still work to do. If you have custom solutions deployed to SharePoint, you have to re-deploy them. Fortunately these are still stored in SharePoint.

SharePoint service applications are not started and you may receive an error like "There are no addresses available for this application" (in logs, event viewer and of course in the web application.

1. In SharePoint central administration open Application Management
2. Under Service Applications select Services on Server
3. Click Start next to service applications that you wish to restart.

You will also notice virtual applications reappearing in your IIS under your SharePoint Services IIS site.

Redeploy solutions

OMG, also solutions are gone from web applications. Yes you need to re-deploy these as well.

1. In SharePoint Central Administration select System Settings
2. Select Manage Farm solutions
3. You will see that all solutions are (probably) there but none of them is deployed.
4. Deploy each solution as needed by selecting the solution and clicking “Deploy solution” and following steps.

Review

After redeploying check your web applications if everything is working correctly. I noticed even though solutions were not deployed, the data, configuration and permissions remained.

<Value IncludeTimeValue="TRUE" Type="DateTime">2009-10-28T10:00:00Z</Value>

Thanks, ucsharp for publishing this.

You can avoid this in a simple way:

1. Rename the .img file into an .iso file.

2. Download 7-zip portable version and extract the executable to a folder on your server desktop.

3. Navigate to the extracted folder and run 7-ZipPortable.exe.

4. Browse and open (double-click) the renamed .iso file

5. You can extract all files from the .iso to another folder on your desktop

Now you can browse to that folder and run the setup of language pack with no problem.

In VS I’ve prepared a custom event receiver which needed to be run as system account (for performing actions that the user running the event receiver doesn’t have – like setting permissions, creating subwebs,…)

So my code began with something lilke that:

…

public override void ItemUpdated(SPItemEventProperties properties)
        {
            base.ItemUpdated(properties);
            _properties = properties;

            //povišamo pravice na sistemski račun in zaženemo private metodo
            SPSecurity.RunWithElevatedPrivileges(doSomethingWithThis);
        }

        private void doSomethingWithThis()
        {

            SPSite site = new SPSite(_properties.SiteId);
            SPWeb web = site.OpenWeb(_properties.RelativeWebUrl);
            SPListItem item = web.Lists[_properties.ListItem]

…

after running it and tracing the error I’ve always received “Access denied” error. How come, if I’m running the code with elevated privileges. Do I need even a higher privilege?

After countless attempts to impersonate an administrator or app pool account (I’m still a rookie at this), I’ve discovered that the SPItemEventProperties are instantiated with privileges of user that triggered the event receiver. The error was in my last line (of the example above) — _properties.ListItem still holds the rights of the original user. so fixed my code to

…

public override void ItemUpdated(SPItemEventProperties properties)
        {
            base.ItemUpdated(properties);
            _properties = properties;

            //povišamo pravice na sistemski račun in zaženemo private metodo
            SPSecurity.RunWithElevatedPrivileges(ustvariPonudbaSubsite);
        }

        private void ustvariPonudbaSubsite()
        {

            SPSite site = new SPSite(_properties.SiteId);
            SPWeb web = site.OpenWeb(_properties.RelativeWebUrl);
            SPListItem item = web.Lists[_properties.ListId].GetItemById(_properties.ListItem.ID);

…

With that change I’ve open the SPListItem object as system account and magically everything started working as it should! The same goes for site and web object. If you need to run actions with elevated privileges on SPSite and SPWeb object use

new SPSite(_properties.SiteId);
and
site.OpenWeb(_properties.RelativeWebUrl)

instead of

_properties.web
and
web.site;