I was trying to bring-up SharePoint Central Admin on my old virtual machine (VPC 2007), but it never seemed to show-up.
When I tried to start the IIS Manager, I found no listings in it. I remembered, I had the same issue with one of my client recently and wanted to get to the root of this.
The only thing that I saw on the left pane was “IIS…” and the message “There are no items to see in this view.” on the right pane.
Looking at the Event Viewer – Systems, I saw this error specific to the “Service Control Manager” -
EventID: 7024
Error description: “The IIS Admin Service service terminated with service-specific error 2149648394 (0x8021080A).”
A little bit of web searching gave me a quick understanding about the metabase file getting corrupt and needed a restore from the IIS history folder.
Note: Some posts advised killing the inetinfo.exe in the TaskManager, which I never found as one of the processes.
So this is what I did to restore my previous metabase file (Here, it needs your intuition to make a call, and select a proper metabase file that you know would have been in a “GOOD STATE” before things got corrupted.) I compared the timestamp of the current file and looked for a file which was earlier than that. It worked for me and hopefully should work for you too :)
#1. Go to the folder location “C:\WINDOWS\system32\inetsrv” and backup the file named “MetaBase.xml”. Then delete this file from this location.
#2. Browse to the “C:\WINDOWS\system32\inetsrv\History” subfolder and choose the right .xml metabase file that you found to be in a good state. It should be called something like “MetaBase_0000013890_0000000000.xml”.
#3. Copy this file and paste it in “C:\WINDOWS\system32\inetsrv” folder.
#4. Now rename this to “MetaBase.xml”.
#5. Restart IIS. If the “IIS Admin Service” and all its dependent services are enabled, you IIS tree would start appearing. If not then probably, you need to look for each of the dependant services and try to start them in the order they need to be. Good Luck!!!
