Thursday, February 12, 2009

Deleting Services Forcefully from Services MMC

Few days back I modified my Windows Service .NET Application and compiled to MSI to be re-installed. Somehow during un-install process, service was not removed from Services Microsoft Management Console (MMC) and it came to my notice during re-installation of MSI.

As there is no Delete option available in Services MMC, it was becoming a nightmare to re-install it. Some how I found SC.EXE which is a command line program to communicate with Service Control Manager and Services.

There are many available options but what interested me is you can Create, Start, Stop, Delete a service with a Command Line.

Creating a Service:

sc.exe create PayCalcService binPath= "C:\Program Files\PaymentCalculation\paycalc.exe" DisplayName= "PaymentCalculationService"

Starting a Service:
sc.exe start PaymentCalculationService

Stopping a Service:
sc.exe stop PaymentCalculationService

Deleting a Service:
sc.exe delete PaymentCalculationService

Hope this helps for similar problems...

8 comments:

  1. very nice and stright forward solution. Thanx

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  2. I hoped this could help but if the service is allready marked for deletion there is no way around of restarting the server

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  3. To the comment above August 30, 2012:

    Sometimes just closing the services console and reopening rather than refreshing completes the uninstall / delete process, I think the console puts a lock on it or caches it.

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  4. I just found this article, and your method for deletion worked perfectly. Thanks!

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  5. Closing Server Manager allowed the service to be completely removed. When I re-opened Server Manager - the service no longer showed up in the list of installed services.

    ReplyDelete
  6. Really helpful - just needed a quick and clear explanation and you provided it - thank you!

    ReplyDelete