"The DataSourceID of 'TopNavigationMenuV4' must be of the ID of a control of type IHierarchicalDataSource. A control with ID 'topSiteMap' could not be found."
Wow. What the hell is that. Googled it and found a SQL query you could run in your db to fix this. But that only ended up in "0 rows affected" so no luck. I guess there were more errors than just this...
Tried all possible ways to access the sites like adding _layouts/settings.aspx, adding ?contents=1 after welcome.aspx, opened Manage content and structure but the site was not listed there, opened Site Settings and Site hierarchy and clicked on Manage (strangely enough the link to the site and subsites was still in there) but all I got was the "Internal server error" message.
I googled to death to find a solution but there seemed to be none that worked for me. But found this article on MS that this is a known issue: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/937038. But that is for MOSS and we are on SP2010 so did not dare apply that.
Seemed like the only solution was to restore the site.
But I could not restore it back to its original place since the sites were still there... even if I tried the force command I could not overwrite the sites (using the Import-SPWeb and -force). Error in Powershell was cannot find an spweb object with ID or URL...
Could not delete the site through Powershell command delete either (Remove-SPWeb). Same error in powershell as above.
Finally found a command that worked though and that is run through STSADM in Powershell:
1) First enum all sites stsadm -o enumallwebs -databasename WSS_YourDBname
2) Then you need to find out what GUID the db's has (I usually export them to a txt file for easy copy)
Get-SPWebApplication "http://spserver/" | Get-SPSite -Limit All | Get-SPWeb -Limit All | Select Title, ID, URL | out-file d:webs.txt | format-table -auto
3) In Powershell enter this command
stsadm -o deleteweb -force -webid "GUID" -databaseserver yourdbserverinstancename -databasename WSS_YourDBname
This will delete the sites.
Some of these deletions can take a looong time. But just leave it running, do not interrupt it.
