Brett's SharePoint Blog

Resolving Issues with Faulty Features and STSADM EXPORT

If you're attempting an STSADM -o export (or, I'd assume, a content deployment) of a site and receive the following error:

FatalError: Failed to compare two elements in the array.

Check out the following KB article: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/948726/en-us .

The article indicates that the likely cause is one or more invalid feature references in the SPSite and/or SPWeb object. Fortunately, Steven Van de Craen authored a wonderful GUI tool for removing "faulty features" (which is of course unsupported and should be used with caution, but nonetheless very useful). See his article on the topic for more details.

Cases where you might encounter these errors:

  • Sites that were migrated from a MOSS Enterprise implementation (even if they're not USING Enterprise features) to a MOSS Standard implementation
  • Sites that were created in an beta version of MOSS/WSSv3
  • Sites which reference custom features that have since been removed from the filesystem but were not properly deactivated and uninstalled
Published Friday, March 21, 2008 7:29 AM by bgeoffro
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About bgeoffro

I'm a senior consultant with Microsoft Consulting Services, focusing exclusively in SharePoint technologies. I've been at Microsoft and working with SharePoint since 2005. Previous to that, I'd been working in the portals/content management/enterprise search space since 2000 with Java-based competitor's products (Documentum, Vignette, Verity, BEA). My professional experience in the IT field goes back to the mid-90s, though general IT experience extends all the way back to authoring my first BASIC program for the Commodore 64 in 1982.

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