IIS Admin service terminates with 0×8021080A

After having some disk problems, I tried to start my development service and low and behold the World Wide Web publishing service wouldn’t start. Seems that the IIS Admin service (which the WWW service depends on) was terminating with an error code of 0×8021080A. Seems that during the chkdsk something was overwritten or corrupted.

Investigating I came to find that MetaBase.xml file that the IIS Admin service uses was a 0KB size. Which means basically that it lost all the configuration that IIS had. For those that don’t know, IIS has two XML files (MBSchema.xml and MetaBase.xml) that it uses to store all the configuration for your websites and IIS which are located in c:\windows\system32\inetsrv.

Even though this basically sucked, it was very easy to fix:

1) in windows explorer, browse to c:\windows\system32\inetsrv

2) rename the two XML files that IIS uses for configure.

3) goto the history folder (c:\windows\system32\inetsrv\history) and find the most recent backups of the two files.

4) copy the backups to the c:\windows\system32\inetsrv and rename them.

5) start the IIS Admin service.