Tomcat Not Starting

We are doing some work with a Java based application (Alfresco) that we have deployed using a Windows installer.

Recently, we had an issue where the starting of the services (Tomcat and Postgres) both failed, they would say \”Starting\” for about 5 seconds and then stop.

The log in the Application Log showed

Starting Tomcat Server…
Exit code: 1
Stdout:

Stderr:
Unknown error starting tomcat

No logs were written to the application log files to find out what the problem was.

We tried reinstalling the services to see if there was an issue with the service itself, but that did not fix the problem either.

Many of the posts online mention upgraded versions of Java (7 to 8 typically) but again, not in this instance.

Digging further into the Windows Error Log, we found that the service was throwing an error like:

The service terminated with the following service-specific error: Incorrect function.

Again it seemed like a version or missing component issue

What appears to have happened, and coincidentally a Windows update happened at the same time, was that the Java Virtual Machine details and the Classpath details had been cleared.

By adding these back in, we were able to get the services back up and running