How to recover from a malfunctioning SharePoint Master Page

Jaydeep Patel

May 21, 2013

All Post

Recover from a broken Master Page

Last night I had a bit of fun trying to fix a bad Master Page that prevented access to anything in a site collection via the browser. This Master Page had a reference to a SharePoint Feature that had since been retracted and removed. The solution was to use PowerShell to change the Master Page:

$Site = get-spsite “http ://SharePoint/Sites/SpecificSite”
$webcount = $Site.AllWebs.Count
$webs=$Site.AllWebs
for ($i=0; $i -lt $webcount; $i++)
{
 $web=$webs[$i]
 $Master=$web.get_MasterUrl()
 $Master=$Master.Replace("your-custom-master", "v4.master")
 $web.set_Masterurl($Master)
 $web.update()
 $web.dispose()
}