Basically, right after getting Team Foundation Server up and running, I created a new project collection with a better name for my group rather than using the default “DefaultCollection” or whatever it is. Unfortunately, because SQL was hammering my available memory, the schema creation task during the collection setup failed.

After getting my memory issue worked out, I setup a new collection and all was good. The only issue is that in my TFS admin screen, I still had this old corrupt collection in my list. It was not attached (and displayed) to Team Explorer, but it bothered me to have this corrupt database laying around. Unfortunately, the TFS admin utility would not allow me to delete the collection because it thought the SQL database associated was still updating its schema. I tried digging through the Tfs_Configuration SQL database to see if I could trick TFS into thinking the status was good, but I found nothing that seemed safe or that wouldn’t leave me a bunch of orphaned records in my configuration db.

Thanks to Anna Russo, a member of the MSDN forums, I found a trick that worked. Here was her suggestion:

1. Run command prompt as administrator and navigate to drive:\Program
Files\Microsoft Team Foundation Server 2010\Tools
2. tfsconfig collection
/detach /collectionName:<name> or  tfsconfig collection
/delete /collectionName:<name>
3. You will be prompted
if you are sure

The “tfsconfig collection /delete /collectionName:<name>” option worked for me and now I am free and clear!