How can I get a 500 server error message to show as a 404

hundreds of urls with 500 error messages

[deanw]

I need to delete hundreds of records in my database that will result in 500 'current record has been deleted' error messages
with the URL's. I have a user friendly page for visitors but I really need to show these URL's as 404's. Any suggestions on how to do this?

[Receptional Andy]

This sounds to me like there isn't any error checking within the script itself, and so you're falling back to default errors.

Now, I'm not too hot on ASP, and without knowing the code that triggers the error there's only so specific I can get. But if my assumption is correct it should be a fairly straightforward error routine: if records don't exist, then output a 404 header with Response.Status = "404 Not Found".

It might be possible to hack a custom error document to try to achieve a similar thing, but unless I've misunderstood what's going on that wouldn't be a very good approach.