Sean Wallbridge
This is an old post that I’m refreshing as I noticed it was appearing in search results (but on my old blog, I got TONNES of people saying this helped them, so I’m hoping to do that again by bumping this to the top…)
Ok, this one took a while to sort out and I believe people will have different results…
In my case (but I don’t think it was even specific to MS SQL, just the result of it, an MSDE database (MSSQLSERVER) service failed to start. After much troubleshooting and only “Error 193: 0xc1” to work with (no event logs, nothing!), I managed to figure out that it was because there was a file called ‘program’ at the root of the D: (whatever drive impacts you). Not sure at this writing how it got there (no it wasn’t a virus, probably just bad code by somebody or a pipe) but that file wasn’t needed but the SQL Service was following that path instead of honouring the path it should have (as identified in the service path).
So, I renamed the file called ‘program’ to something else and voila, I was back in business.
I hope this helps someone, somewhere faster than I was able to help myself 🙂 Let me know about if it helped you – heck, buy me a beer