Description:  A quick post to describe one possible resolution for:  “Error 0x80070002 while preparing to load the package. The system cannot find the file specified.”  This discussion applies to SQL Server 2008 R2.

Level:  101

The Error

After doing an SSIS deployment to a Production environment, I executed a package and received the following error.

Error 0x80070002 while preparing to load the package. The system cannot find the file specified.

What was troubling about this error is that the package ran fine in the BIDS environment, and it also ran fine within the Development and QA environments.  So what’s up with it not running in the Production environment?

The Resolution

In my situation, the resolution was to change the Package property for “ProtectionLevel” to the “DontSaveSensitive” setting.  It had been previously set to the default of “EncryptSensitiveWithUserKey.”  We use package configurations to handle all data connection properties, so the setting of Don’t Save Sensitive works just fine (this is still a 2008 R2 implementation, not yet migrated to 2012 where package configurations are a thing of the past).

This is one of those cases where the error message had me puzzled a bit.  It’s not that the .dtsx file wasn’t there at all; it’s that the new environment couldn’t access it considering the ProtectionLevel setting.