Problem

You’ve lost, or you’ve accidentally deleted ,the Central Administration database from your MOSS or Windows SharePoint Services environment.

Explanation

Obviously corruptions happen, users get carried away with stsadm, or, in my case, you simply deleted the wrong database and you didn’t have a backup. Luckily for me, I made this mistake in a test environment. Not to worry, there’s any easy fix, see below!

Solution

It’s actually quite simple to recover a central administration database if you have another central admin database that exists in the same domain. Simply backup the database from one farm and restore it to the other. If you can’t get your hands on another central admin database you’ll probably be able to get one from a friendly forum user but you might have to modify the UserInfo tables directly in order to get your user information added to the database.

Here’s what I did to recover my accidentally deleted central administration database:

Step 1 – Add a new content database to your existing (but empty) central administration website.

Stsadm -o addcontentdb -url http://sharepoint:8080 -databasename SP_Admin_Content

(Note that 8080 above is my standard central admin port)

Step 2 – Get a copy of another central admin database by backing up central admin from another farm using the following command

Stsadm -o backup -url http://otherfrm:8080 -filename c:\central.bak

Step 3 - Restore that backup to the farm that’s broken

Stsadm -o restore -url http://sharepoint:8080 -filename c:\central.bak

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