Friday, October 10, 2008

This page has encountered a critical error. Contact your system administrator if this problem persists.

ERROR:"An error occurred during the parsing of a resource required to service this request. Please review the following specific parse error details and modify your source file appropriately. "

Do you get this error in your sharepoint site ?

Just one bad day you come in to see that your main page is bombing due to this error with no proper clue .Well it happened to me and i had no idea what went wrong.After lot of research i found something.

I had "?" marks all over my web.config file , which even erased some of characters.

Solution :

Search for "?" in web.config and start fixing the character in the file. I would suggest replace the web.config (obviously retain the custom entry ) with working one , i replaced my web .config with a working one and Volla!!! it worked for me .

In short the culprit is web.config and not SharePoint installation.

Cheers!!!

If this helps do leave comments , i would like to know how many SharePointeers got into this issue. :-)

9 comments:

Anonymous said...

thanks for ur help.it help me from critical time.

Unknown said...

I have the same error in my site, sharepoint, but i do not know how to fix it, im new in this program and dont know anything about web.config file, could any bodye please help me?

Rags Iyer said...

Diego ,

You have to look into your server root files . There will be file named web.config.

Its same as web.config file for ASP.NET application.

Unknown said...

OK, i have found it searchin in my pc, now what do i have to do in order to start my share point again? Regards and thanks for your help

Rags Iyer said...

There can be multiple web.config in your machine. I would suggest make copy of the file you are making changes to , as any mistake might break your sharepoint site. Once you make copy you can try to make the change as in article and perform IISRESET and check site.

Note : The above method worked in my scenario . Your case/issue might be different so make sure in case the change doesn't work replace the actual web.config file.

Unknown said...

Raghu,
It appears doesnt work, so, how can i replace my web.config file for a newest one?

Rags Iyer said...

I meant replace it with your old one. The one which was present before making any suggested change in this article.

Unknown said...

I cant solve the problem, are there any others directions to follow in order to find a solution? now i have the same issue with others share point sites like http://11311.freesharepoint.com

Anonymous said...

Wow, I ran into this problem today and was freakin out! This solved my problem! I LOVE you! My Sp DB went suspect after a power outage. I restored it but got PARSE ERRORS when trying to access my site.

First I did this to my web.config file:

Change


This showed that i had '?' showing up that should not be there. I thought I was crazy. I tried removing the '?', but it did not work! I restored my web.config from backup and its fixed!

I found this site which pointed me again to the web.config.

Sweet. The file gets corrupt sometimes!

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