MOSS 2007 : stsadm -o preupgradecheck found missing feature files for features still active in deployment

Question

This is the last thing I have left to fix to pass the pre upgrade check. There are a three features that are referenced by the content but not installed on the server (not sure how this happened). Two are unnamed and one has an invalid scope.

My question is, how do I go about removing these features?

Here is the output from the preupgrade check:

* Name = IPCSmallSearchBox, Feature id = 2636a3cf-91e0-4e72-af0e-41c157d3c98a, Reference count = 1, Scope = ScopeInvalid, Status = Missing
* Name = Unknown, Feature id = 78b94e15-23ce-43f9-8036-babd847497d1, Reference count = 2, Scope = Web, Status = Missing
* Name = Unknown, Feature id = b350420a-9b03-4e21-bc70-359e84f65359, Reference count = 3, Scope = Web, Status = Missing

Specifically id like to know how what scope=scopeinvalid means. Is it, the feature was scoped at the site level, activated then changed to web level and then goes missing?

Answer 1

You need to find which sites contain references to the features. Then identify what the dependencies are, and remove them.

I assume they are all third party/custom features?

If you can, try to identify what the features were, where they were used and try to remove the content references.

Answer 2

What I ended up going for all of the missing features was create an empty feature.xml file, putting them in appropriately named feature folders (feature1, feature2, IPCSmallSearchBox) and assigning the correct guids. Then, via stsadm commands I installed each feature. This eliminated the problem.

Now I can go through the site collections and find out where these features are used and deactivate/uninstall them.

Not very eloquent I know.