I have a shelved CL in a workspace which no longer exists ( the admin deleted my entire workspace) I have set up my workspace again and would like to move the shelved CL to the new workspace; how can I do that. I tried the "change ownership" option but it says remove all checked out files from the CL before changing ownership. If I remove the checked out files I will loose all the changes; and since I do not have the workspace on which the change was created
You want the "unshelve" command; that will copy the shelved files from your old workspace's pending changelist into a different pending changelist in your current workspace.
The "change ownership" option SHOULD work under the circumstances you've described, so I suspect something is off, but "unshelve" will work regardless so I recommend just doing that unless you have a specific need to use the same changelist number.