Recovery_Pending State After Moving SQL Server Files

Jon Shaulis gives us a couple of reasons why our databases could be stuck in Recovery_Pending state after moving file locations:

The scripts I ran to edit the rest of the databases looked similar to the below:

1 2	ALTER DATABASE msdb MODIFY FILE ( NAME = ‘MSDBDat’ , FILENAME = ‘M:\MSSQL\Data\MSDBDat.mdf’ ); ALTER DATABASE msdb MODIFY FILE ( NAME = ‘MSDBLog’ , FILENAME = ‘L:\MSSQL\Logs\MSDBLog.ldf’ );

Once I finished altering all of my database files to their new locations, I stopped the SQL Server Service in Services. I copied and pasted all MDF and LDF files to their correlated new destinations and then started the SQL Server Service once more.

That’s when I ran into the interesting issue of “Recovery in a Pending state”. Some digging and sleuthing brought me back to my scripts.

Read on for those causes.