MSMQ problem: admin_queue$' cannot be initialized

Question

We had during a planned failover of a cluster (Server 2003) an error:

The Message Queuing service cannot start. The internal private queue 'admin_queue$' cannot be initialized (Error: 0xc00e0001). If the problem persists, reinstall Message Queuing.

We were not able to start the MSMQ cluster resource on the node(s). because of urgence we did a reinstall (removed the cluster MSMQ resource and added it again).

Does anybody have an ideas how the MSMQ data got corrupted, can we avoid this in the future or can we restore the MSMQ data?

Kind regards,

Jonathan

Answer 1

In the ClusteredMSMQ\storage\LQS directory there are a bunch of files that hold the configuration of your queues. One of these is the admin_queue$ file and something happened to it. Either it's missing or corrupted. Easiest solution is to copy a file from another MSMQ machine. The admin_queue$ file should be the same from machine to machine as it's not user-generated and is non-configurable. Make sure you copy the file to the right place - not the local msmq\storage\lqs directory.