Clearing padlocks on SMS or ConfigMgr objects

During an in place migration from SMS 2003 to ConfigMgr a best practice is to build a new SMS site and attach it as a child so that you can replicate all of your objects, break the parent – child relationship and then upgrade to ConfigMgr. At that point you can decide if everything upgraded successfully, the new site is healthy, all objects have been replicated and then you can migrate your clients to the new ConfigMgr site. For more details on this migration strategy check out Kim Oppalfens’ blog post on how to transition from SMS 2003 to ConfigMgr 2007.


When you have a parent – child relationship any collection that is being replicated from the parent site will be locked and can be identified by the little gold padlock icon under the collection node. Now once that relationship is broken the objects that were being replicated will remain and the padlock should then disappear allowing you change that object’s properties. Once in while some of the padlocks will remain after the relationship is broken leaving the object locked and you unable to do anything with that object.

Sometimes the only way to unlock these objects is run a couple of commands in against your SQL database as outlined in Ed Aldrich's article on myITforum.com.

• Stop the SMS_Executive service
• Stop the SMS_Site_Component_Manager service
• Stop the Windows Management Instrumentation service
• Open Microsoft SQL Server Management Studio and connect to your site database
• Identify the collection ID that still has the padlock icon
• Right-click the database and select New Query
• Type select * from collections and click Execute (Red exclamation point on the SQL Editor toolbar)
• Type update collections set flags='18' where siteID='your collection ID' (Note all collection flags should be either 17 or 18)
• Restart your WMI, SMS_Executive and SMS_Site_Component services
• Open your SMS or ConfigMgr console and the padlock icon should be gone from the collection in question