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CREATE FILE encountered operating system error 5 (Access is denied)

I was trying to move some content dbs in our MOSS farm to another drive in the same Server. I stopped all website from IIS and stopped all the related services, then ran stsadm deletecontentdb command with all the required parameters.

Then I detached the db and it threw an error and I just closed it by clicking Ok. Now I went to the drive to copy and paste the .mdf and .ldf file to the new drive. I tried to copy the .mdf file and I got access denied error but the db was already detached, I was screwed! The downtime was only for a couple of hours and I had many dbs to move to this new drive.

I googled for some time and did not get many solutions, some people had encountered this error but none of them posted an answer. I tried to attach the file again from the old location, atleast site will not go down. But when I tried to attach I got this wierd error from SQL Server 2005 Management Studio:

TITLE: Microsoft SQL Server Management Studio
------------------------------

Failed to retrieve data for this request. (Microsoft.SqlServer.SmoEnum)

For help, click: http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink?ProdName=Microsoft+SQL+Server&LinkId=20476

------------------------------
ADDITIONAL INFORMATION:

An exception occurred while executing a Transact-SQL statement or batch. (Microsoft.SqlServer.ConnectionInfo)

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CREATE FILE encountered operating system error 5(Access is denied.) while attempting to open or create the physical file 'M:\SQLDataFiles\Kubera_Portal_CU_Sempra.mdf'. (Microsoft SQL Server, Error: 5123)

For help, click:
http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink?ProdName=Microsoft+SQL+Server&ProdVer=09.00.3042&EvtSrc=MSSQLServer&EvtID=5123&LinkId=20476

The help links provided my Microsoft did not take me anywhere, it did not help!

Now I could not copy the file to new location or attach the file again! Finally somebody wrote in a blog that such files can be copied by taking ownership of the file. I changed the owner and took ownership and then I was able to copy the file to new location. Then there was something else, the .ldf file was missing and I have no clue why that happened. Since there was nothing else to be done, I attached the .mdf file alone and gave a location for the .ldf file and it got attached. Those were some hear pulling moments because I was dealing with a production server!

Comments

Alex said…
For working out problems connected with problem .mdf you can use mdf repair. It doesn't modify source data during restoration, uses modern ways of repairing .mdf files, works under all available Windows OS.

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