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Brian
Asked: 2009-08-04 14:05:24 +0800 CST

Unable to activate the publishing feature on a SharePoint site collection

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I'm having trouble with a site collection in a MOSS2007 farm. I'm trying to enable the Publishing feature at the site collection level. When I try to activate the Feature from Site Settings -> site Collection features, I get one of those incredibly helpful SharePoint error messages. 

Error. Cannot complete this action. Please try again.

So I thought I'd try with stsadm, and I ran this 

stsadm -o activatefeature -name Publishing -url http://server/site

I got the more helpful error message 

Provisioning did not succeed. Details: Failed to create the 'Pages' library.
OriginalException: The feature failed to activate because a list at 'Pages' already
exists in this site.  Delete or rename the list and try activating the feature
again.

Now that's more like it! I checked, and sure enough there was a Pages library. I deleted it. I ran stsadm again fully expecting it to work this time. No dice. I'm getting the same error, but now there's no 'Pages' document library. I emptied the recycle bin. Same error. I'm stumped.

Per the two suggestions below, I made sure that the site collection recylcle bin was also emptied and that there were no 'Images' or 'Documents' libraries hanging around. I still can't activate the feature.

sharepoint sharepoint-2007

3 Answers

  1. Try running a utility like Sharepoint Manager on your site. Maybe it will see a list called Pages that for some reason you aren't seeing through the web interface.

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  2. The publishing features creates three libraries (among other things)

    1. Pages
    2. Images
    3. Documents

    You might need to delete more than just the Pages library.

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  3. sometimes list, web, or page already exist while you are running provisioning code you can use sharepoint designer to pin point that object and delete it from there

    Cheers

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