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So the other day I encountered this error when I simply tried to delete a personal site from a specific user. Once I deleted this personal site then tried to recreate the MySite by clicking on the link I was receiving a credential prompt. Even though I would input the password in correctly I was getting a 401 Unauthorized error after 3 prompts. It didn’t matter if I clicked the Mysite link for a regular everyday user or for an administrator. I suddenly could not access any personal sites! Good thing this was a dev server! Well let’s cut right to the chase and solve this problem shall we…
The solution was to check the Mysite web application and see if any site collections existed. The web application that is hosting your Mysites should have a root site collection and in a perfect world that root site collection SHOULD be using the My Site Host template. So it turned out that yes the web application that was hosting My Sites had a root site collection but was malfunctioning for some reason! I deleted the root site collection from the web application and now it was officially empty. I then created a site collection in the My site web app using the My site host template (shown below) found under the Enterprise tab when creating a site collection ONLY. I created the site collection at the root of the web app which in my case was http://mysite.domainname.com. I went back to see if the “My Site” link was functioning again and how great it was creating a brand new My Site as expected. Remember that earlier I deleted the My Site and wanted to create a new one but when clicking on the My Site link and was greeted with a credential prompt and then the page shown below 401 UNAUTHORIZED (shown below).
So the tip of the day if you run into this problem when accessing Mysites throughout your organization is: Re-create the MySite host site collection by using the MySite Host Template when creating your site collection in the web application that you are using to host your Mysites! I hope this saves some time for people when they run into this issue…and some hair on their head…o:p> Cheers,
About jmedero
Jason Medero, MCP, MCT, MCTS –Is a systems architect with a concentration in Microsoft SharePoint Server and its related Microsoft technologies. He is a managing partner of B&R Business Solutions, a central New Jersey based firm specializing in SharePoint and surrounding technologies, infrastructure, messaging and application development. He is an active member of the SharePoint community, contributing as a mentor for both the SharePoint Portal Server and Windows SharePoint Services forums on MSD2D.com along with many other popular forums.