Web Server 2008 services won't start

[OverWorked]

I've just looked at my external ePortal server (Web Server 2008) and nothing much is running on it. It's virtualised (VMWare Server) but that shouldn't make a difference.

There's no network connection, and a lot of automatic services aren't running. When I try to start any of them I get error 1053. The event viewer doesn't show anything obvious about services not running (I think that's another symptom - events just aren't getting logged - Windows Error Reporting Service isn't running). Even if I try to restart some of the running services, they won't restart.

I back up the VM every week with a script to stop it, copy and restart it. The backup is also corrupt.

I could just create a new VM, and reinstall ePortal and the SSL cert, although on IIS7 that's not a quick job.

Any ideas?

Automatic Services not running:-

Application Experience
Application Host Helper
Cryptographic Services
Diagnostic Policy Service
Distributed Link Tracking Client
Facility Data Server
Facility ePortal
IKE...
IP Helper
IPSec policy
Network List Service
Network Location Awareness
Print Spooler
Remote Registry
Secondary logon
Server
Sophos (various)
Terminal Services
VMWare Tools
Windows Error Reporting Service
WMI
Windows Time
WWW Publishing
Distributed Transaction
KtmRm
TPM Base
Windows Remote Management
Windows Update

Thanks!

[theriver]

How about setting them to manual, except for the error reporting service, and see if it boots happily - then bring the services up one at a time and keep an eye on the error log?

[FN-GM]

Sounds like the IP stack needs reseting. Give it a shot - How to reset Internet Protocol (TCP/IP)

I had a similar problem here on an IIS server. Most services wouldn't start. Got all sorts of various error messages when i tried to start them one of them was "a service that should never failed has failed"

[srochford]

Maybe a stupid question, but have you run out of disc space?

Error reporting shouldn't be running - it's the thing which deals with sending reports to MS after blue screens etc.

Could the permissions be messed up? SYSTEM needs full control pretty much everywhere and if it hasn't got it then I'd expect weirdness (but no idea how that could happen!)

Bad news about the backups. Do you have more than 1? If you could get a working server back from one of them then you could perhaps get data off the current machine (although without networking it's harder but you should be able to just add it as a second drive to the working VM)

[OverWorked]

Thanks everyone. I got it working again, but couldn't find the cause.

In order, I tried:-

1) FN-GM's suggestion for the IP stack. Good idea, but made no difference.
2) srochford: disk space OK, SYSTEM permissions looked OK.
3) theriver: had to restart in safe mode, then used msconfig to disable the non-ms services, and the services control to set the ms services to manual. Rebooted OK, and slowly restarted each service and set back to auto. No problems.

I've spent about 4 hours and rebooted several times with all the stopped services now running and it's perfectly OK.

I have no idea what was causing the problem. System and application logs show nothing untoward. Total mystery.

Thanks for all the suggestions.

[Jules1974]

Hi

Just to bump an old thread, i ran the ip reset command and this didnt work. Then went into safe mode, just rebooted out of safe mode and voila things started working again. God knows why this fixed it but the cause in our case was a power outage made it unhappy.

So the above post is bang on.

Cheers