Please start any new threads on our new site at https://forums.sqlteam.com. We've got lots of great SQL Server experts to answer whatever question you can come up with.

 All Forums
 General SQL Server Forums
 New to SQL Server Administration
 MSSQL Service stuck in "starting" service on boot

Author  Topic 

Enalra
Starting Member

1 Post

Posted - 2009-07-09 : 11:23:30
This may not be the best place to put this:

I've got an interesting situation with my SQL 2005 server. A little bit ago I had to shut down the SQL server due to a power outage. The server is Windows 2003 with SQL 2005 Standard Server. I initiated an orderly shutdown of the server. After the server was shut down the outage took place. When I came in to turn the server back on I hit the power button and waited. The server bootup but the terminal/remote desktop logon window never appeared. After staring at the grey screen for 30 minutes waiting for the remote logon screen (I was with the server KVM connected) the logon failed to appear. I then remoted into another computer and tried to make a connection to the SQL box's services. I was successful. So I went and looked at all the services to see if any were stuck or stopped. I noticed that the MSSQL service was stuck on "Starting". I checked the application logs, system logs etc... and there were no errors reported. The SQL error logs shows everything starting up and then the Service Broker Manager starts and that's the end of the logs. After waiting for an hour trying to see if it would eventually start up I looked back at the services and the MSSQL service was STILL on "starting".

At that point I made an attempt to access the registry thinking maybe if I disable the services for SQL I can reboot the box and it'll let me in and then I can re-enable the services again. That worked. I disabled all services, rebooted, logged in and re-enabled the services in the correct order with no issues.

Now the thing is this only happens during a shutdown/startup not during reboots. I reboot the server often for patches and never encounter this issue. It never happened when we had 2000 only 2005. The issue occurs whether the network cable is unplugged or plugged in.

Any ideas?
   

- Advertisement -