Jan 10

A known issue exists with SharePoint / MOSS 2007 that produces the following error when attempting to delete a master page form the master page gallery:

This item cannot be deleted because it is still referenced by other pages.

 

 

This error might be expected if the master page was still in use, but the error is shown regardless if other pages still reference the master page or not.

A Microsoft Knowledge Base article exists (http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=926812) which suggests setting the master page to a hidden state, but sometimes that isn’t enough. There are times when it is more than just a clean up issue, often it really is necessary to completely remove the file.

To completely delete the master page, perform the following steps:

  1. Navigate to the Master Page Gallery page from the Site Settings page.
  2. Select ‘New’ | ‘Folder’ from the menu bar.
  3. Create the folder with a temporary name such as DeleteMe.
  4. Open the site with SharePoint Designer and navigate to the ‘_catalogs\masterpage’ folder.
  5. Drag and drop the master page to delete into the temporary folder created in the above steps.
  6. Close SharePoint Designer.
  7. Return to the Master Page Gallery and delete the temporary folder.

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    As a note you should also make sure that any files deleted this way are also removed from the recycle bin. Otherwise they will still appear in the content database and make any future masterpage feature provisioning a living nightmare…

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    thanks for this! it was driving me mad to have old master pages clogging up the folder. :)

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