Ever get an "Access to the path c:\... is denied" error when try to deploy or upgrade a SharePoint solution package? I've been getting this error intermittently over the past couple weeks and just today I figured out why! It wasn't rocket science to figure out – but the removal of one less annoying thing in my life is always worth celebrating…
Here were the errors I was getting:
For me anyways, the problem is because I haven't been disciplined with using my solution packages. Sometimes I would deploy/upgrade the solutions, and sometimes I would do it manually. NOT GOOD! When using solutions – don't cheat or be lazy by manually deploying stuff! Always use STSADM. Otherwise your solutions will stop working. Bad Phil, bad!
Anyways, here are the steps I took to fix this access denied error and get my solutions up and running again:
- Delete the file(s) off the file system on all web front ends where you're getting the error – in my case, I'm going to delete the ControllerCPU.aspx file.
- Using STSADM, run the deploysolution command and specify "force":

- The solution should now be successfully deployed:

- (optional) – if you had intended on doing an upgrade to an existing solution, you should now re-run the upgradesolution command again to be safe, just incase if in step 3 you deployed the old solution and not the new one:
Phil