Microsoft SharePoint is a web application platform that has made it easier for people to work together in a collaborative environment. It supports advanced features for content management. People can effectively share their valuable information with others by setting up websites. They can also manage their critical documents and even publish reports for a better strategy planning. MS SharePoint associates a default content database with a web application. You can also have multiple content databases within a single application. Sometimes, these content databases become corrupt due to a SharePoint Server crash. As a consequence, all precious information in the database becomes inaccessible. To overcome this problem, you need to go for SharePoint recovery through a reliable third-party utility.
For instance, while examining your SQL Server error log, you may notice the following sqlcmd error that indicates a possible content database corruption:
“Sqlcmd: Error: Microsoft SQL Native Client : An error has occurred while establishing a connection to the server. When connecting to SQL Server 2005, this failure may be caused by the fact that under the default settings SQL Server does not allow remote connections..”
Cause: The above error generally occurs if there is corruption in one of your SharePoint content databases. The potential reasons behind this corruption are virus infection, hardware errors, faulty updates, application errors, etc.
This would render your precious SharePoint site content inaccessible. If you have an updated backup of the content database per site collection, you can easily restore all your lost invaluable data. However, if you do not have a backup, follow the below mentioned resolution steps.
Resolution: Use the given procedure to resolve the underlying issue:
- Initially, install SQL Management Studio Express on your computer.
- Try any of the given methods to establish a connection to your MS SQL Server Instance-
- Server: \\.\pipe\MSSQL$Instance\sql\query
- Windows authentication
- Try detaching the corrupt content database.
- Reattach the corrupt database.
- Now, restart the SharePoint Server.
If the problem still persists, you should take help of competent SharePoint Server recovery software. These third-party tools perform comprehensive scan of the corrupt MDF file to repair and restore SharePoint databases and other uploaded documents, such as blogs, wikis, articles, etc. They allow you to take a sneak-peek at the database objects prior to recovery.