Jordan Boich troubleshoots an issue:
SQL Server won’t start and at first, I couldn’t figure out why. When I logged off for the day on Friday, everything was happy, but when I logged on Monday morning, a heavily used test instance of SQL was not running and wouldn’t start.
Quick side note, and it’s funny looking back on now, but in the moment it sucks. You ever have to start the SQL Server Service from Configuration Manager, and when you right click -> Start, or right click -> Restart you see that green progress bar start to go and under normal healthy circumstances, it probably gets a third of the way through before SQL kicks over. But when you start to see that progress bar start to make more and more progress, you know before it even fails on you that something isn’t going to work right. You start to get that sinking feeling in your stomach. That was me.
Click through for the troubleshooting process as well as the end result.