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I have an on-premises installation of SharePoint 2013 on a development server, with a dedicated SQL Server instance on another server. Recently, my Central Administration site would stop loading and show a simple white screen.

Looking at the page source that comes back, I get the following:

<html><head><META HTTP-EQUIV="Content-Type" CONTENT="text/html; charset=utf-8"><meta name="Robots" content="NOINDEX " /></head><body></body>
                <script type="text/javascript">
                 var gearPage = document.getElementById('GearPage');
                 if(null != gearPage)
                 {
                     gearPage.parentNode.removeChild(gearPage);
                     document.title = "Error";
                 }
                 </script>
                 </html>

I do not see any errors in the ULS or in the server event logs.

I have restarted both IIS and the SharePoint server. I have also successfully re-provisioned the Central Administration instance by using the following commands:

Unprovision: psconfig.exe -cmd adminvs unprovision

Provision: New-SPCentralAdministration -Port <your-port-num>

This post suggests that SharePoint be completely re-installed, but that's not an acceptable solution for me. Does anyone have any suggestions for this issue?

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1 Answer 1

Reset to default
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I would do following things to troubleshoot the issue.

  • Enable the IIS trace logging to get the actual error.
  • Turn Off the Custom Logging for the Central admin site.
  • Check the ULS logs and Event Logs for more clue.
  • Make Sure Default Web Site is stoped
  • Make Sure the Central admin App Pool and SharePoint timer service are running under the Farm admin account.
  • try to disable the loop back check on the server.
  • Run this command Get-SPWebApplication -IncludeCentralAdministration see if it return the Central admin. if Yes then try to use the url mentioned in it.
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  • Thanks for the suggetions. I was always getting an HTTP 200 response when loading the site. It just woudn't return any content. Howerver, changing the web.config to debug="false" allows the site to load, albeit very slow. I'll keep digging, but thanks for your help!
    – Eric Paulsen
    Jan 5, 2017 at 18:56
  • most useful is turning off Custom Logging... immediately revealed the error. Don't forget to reverse the web.config settings
    – Aaronster
    Sep 26, 2020 at 14:16

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