ServerInstance failed to reach status ‘Running’

In one of my previous posts I described how to install D365 Business Central. When performing an installation from scratch at customer site on their server I always choose to install without specifying any service account. This will ensure almost always a 100% succesfull install in the first time. Two other main reasons:

• If the customer hasn’t arranged a serviceaccount yet or made a configuration mistake I can still install. This will minimize lost time ensures that an installation will always be performed. As always please to try prepare as many tasks as possible to ensure a succesfull install. You could do an prerequiste check with some kind of checklist of intakeform.
• If the serviceaccount has a problem the setup will error and perform a rollback. This is a waste of precious time (rollback time is a lenghty proces in my opinion) and the problem has to be fixed and the setup has to be performed again.

So the very next thing to do after the setup is to change the serviceaccount for the server instance. This however introduces a problem because the serverinstance won’t start then:

Textual error:
ServerInstance ‘MicrosoftDynamicsNavServer$NST130Test’ failed to reach status ‘Running’

When checking the Windows Application log I see below is causing the problem:

Server instance: NST130Test
Cannot create the path C:\ProgramData\Microsoft\Microsoft Dynamics NAV\130\Server\MicrosoftDynamicsNavServer$NST130Test\assembly for this service instance. Make sure that permissions are set up correctly for the service account.

This means the serviceaccount has no permissions to create the path. The next thing to do then is to grant the serviceaccount Modify permissions on the C:\ProgramData\Microsoft\Microsoft Dynamics NAV\130\Server folder.

Theoretically your BC service should start without problems now.