How to get Confluence running

[Bernie_Mheiny]

After stopping the Atlassian service on my windows server to remove a virus, I cannot get Confluence to load.  Have restarted the service, have rebooted the server.  The service does start but when you try to access the site it does not come up.  even tried http://localhost:8090/ 

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

What do the logs say the problem is?

Start with a look at <confluence home>/logs/atlassian-confluence.log - this is the application log which, in my experience, tells you about 90% of start up failures.

If this doesn't say anything about failing to start, move on to <confluence install>/log/catalina.out which tells us what the application server is doing (the application server is what you can see running the service, even though the confluence application is failing)

Admittedly, a lot of these are damn cryptic, but I think we're now at around 75% "copy error, paste into a search engine, get the right answer"  (often landing here in Community, which is nice)