How to delete Root-level SiteCollection

Question

I was supposed to create a sitecollection for a web-app. By mistake I created it as a rootlevel site collection instead of a subsite through UI.

For Eg.:
Web app -> http://abc.ab.com
Sitecollection to be created -> http://abc.ab.com/sites/newsite

But I didn't select /sites/ from drop down in the web address. Now it is displaying the root level site with a title -> newsite (which should not be present). The site is also not getting browsed, it is throwing error.

Can anyone help me how to delete or erase this from CA? If I delete the root level site collection what is the impact?

Thanks.

Answer 1

If I understand correctly, there's never been a root-level site collection in your Web app (otherwise, you "/" would not have been an option when creating a new collection, "/sites/" would have been the only-and-default option.

So, to delete it, you can simply go to Central Administration, "Applications management", "Delete a site collection", select the correct collection in the top-right corner (that brings a dialog where you may have, again from the top-right link, to select the correct Web application), (i.e. select "/" in the list of collections) and click "Delete".

This will surely remove the site collection you had created at the root of the Web app. This is not reversible (no recycle bin for site collections), so maybe getting a backup of he DB is a good idea first.

Note that missing a site collection at "/" may have some impacts, like the search crawler not working for this entire Web app...