Why won't JIRA service start on Windows after 5.2.2 upgrade?

[Solitonman]

I just updated our JIRA 5.0.1 instance to JIRA 5.2.2. The installation seemed to go well, but when I went into the Windows Service Manager to start the service it wasn't there. I found a page at https://confluence.atlassian.com/pages/viewpage.action?pageId=312739859 that seemed to touch on a similar problem. I followed workaround 1 and ended up with the service installed, but now it won't start. It keeps failing without giving a meaningful message of any kind. The failure code is 0, which doesn't seem much use to me.

I used sc query from the command prompt and saw a win32_exit_code value of 1066 (0x42a), but I can't find anything on Google about this that seems to be relevant.

The registry entry for the service does point to tomcat7, so I don't have any need to try anything from the workaround 2 option. I can go for 3 and do a new install, but I'd kind of like to know what the problem is in the first place before starting down that path.

If anyone has any suggestions I'd really be grateful to hear them. This is a time-sensitive problem, in that we need JIRA back up for work tomorrow, so I'll have to have this resolved by then.

[Ivan Tse · Accepted solution]

It sounds like the service for JIRA wasn't created correctly even after running the service.bat remove/install. Would you happen to hav your jave_home set in your environment variables?

https://confluence.atlassian.com/display/JIRA/Installing+Java#InstallingJava-Windows-basedcomputers

If you don't have that set, make sure to set it and verify with echo %JAVA_HOME% in a command prompt. Once that is set correctly, try to run service.bat remove/install again to re-create the service.

Since this is time sensitive, you can still start JIRA without the service.

<JIRA-install>/bin/startup.bat in a command window will start JIRA. You will need to leave that windows session open though. If you made any memory adjustments in your previous installation, you'll need to make sure to apply those changes to setenv.bat in the bin folder as well. You can at the least have JIRA running for the work day.

[Solitonman]

Ivan,

Thank you so much for your advice! While the problem wasn't that %JAVA_HOME% didn't exist, it was related. It turned out that the variable was pointed to an unsupported JDK. Once I fixed that and removed and reinstalled the service it ran fine.

Thanks again, I really appreciate your advice! :)