5.5 MTA Service won't start

[guidovalduchi]

Leave it to Microsoft to give me a cryptic error message - anyway we have 2 exchange servers, one acts as the main server handling all incoming and outgoing mail. The second server is a backup and its main position is to hold mailboxes that have overflowed the capacity of machine #1. To make a long story short, we had a very bad electical storm over the weekend and all of our servers powered off via powerchute (not sure if it has anything to do with the problem, but I'm covering everything!).

Yesterday afternoon the MTA service on the second machine died without cause or warning. Numerous attempts at starting/rebooting/swearing didn't start the service until 3 hours later it just started on its own after my last ditch reboot attempt. Overnight the MTA service failed again, and nothing that I do today can bring it back up. I have hundreds of messages stuck in the MTA queue and a server that is now on its knees trying to keep up with the increased traffic that it has to handle.

The error message that is returned by windows when I try to start the MTA service is this: Could not start the Microsoft Exchange Message Transfer Agent service on Local Computer. The service did not return an error. This could be an internal Windows error or an internal serice error. If the problem persists, contact your system administrator.

Any help would be greatly appreciated!
Thanks

 

[Hungster]

did some one by accident change the MTA service logon ?
or change the sys admin account while your MTA is using admin account ??

 

[Zelandakh]

check services. Which acc does MTA use? Is it locked out? Internal NT error is often the same as "you are out of disk space on that drive but I'm going to give a cryptic message".

 

[guidovalduchi]

Thanks everyone for your help, I actually figured out that it was a disk space problem. Darn Exchange moved the files to the wrong drive on the machine!

Thanks again everyone