Troubleshooting steps for SharePoint and Search- displaying real Error

Here are two way to troubleshoot issues with SharePoint environment. It's really very basic steps and known for a while in SharePoint community, I am describing them here for quick access and also if this helps even one person searching on Inet, my effort is worth. First one will be useful when you recieve error on any site and second one will be useful when you are trying to work with faulty web part.

Displaying real Error message in Sharepoint site :

If you have encountered generic error message, where SharePoint tells you that it encountered error without giving you any detail,
following steps will display real error.

1. First make a backup copy of your web.config of specific web application.
2. Open web.config and look for SafeMode tag. Change callstack to true :
   After changing, your SafeMode node should be similar to following line :
   
   SafeMode MaxControls="200″ CallStack="true" DirectFileDependencies="10″ TotalFileDependencies="50″ AllowPageLevelTrace="false"
   
3. Set customErrors mode="Off"
4. Now refresh your page and you should see some descriptive error message - happy debugging.

Displaying Web Part Maintenance Page:

In case you start having issue on any page where faulty webpart is stoping you from editing page to remove it, remove that webpart by opening web part maintenance page.

You will need to append "?contents=1" at the end of URL of page, this will cause SharePoint to open Web Part Maintenance Page. On this page you will be able to remove web part in question.

For example, if the URL of your page is

http://YOUR.GREAT.SITE/Saajan/default.aspx

then Web Part Maintenance Page url will be

http://YOUR.GREAT.SITE/Saajan/default.aspx?contents=1

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Following two links are for SharePoint Search Services:

• How search ranks pages
• Search service stuck at stopping or starting