How do you restart the Task Scheduler service without rebooting the server?

Question

I am running into an issue with the task scheduler service and I have found that restarting the Task Scheduler service should do the trick in fixing my problem. Unfortunately, I do not have the option in services.msc (as Administrator) to stop, start, or restart the service as the options are greyed out. I have also attempted to use both the "net" and "sc" utilities to stop and start the "SCHEDULE" service, but I keep getting an "Access Denied" error when I try to stop it. I really need to restart this service but I cannot bring down the machine today as it is a workday.

The server's OS is Windows SBS 2011 Essentials. Thanks in advance for any help in the matter.

Solution 1

The only way I could stop this service without rebooting the server was to run a command prompt using the service account. Do this I used PsExec from Sysinternals

psexec -i -s cmd

In the new window I was able to issue the service stop command with no problem

sc stop schedule

Solution 2

I guess I could restart the service by finding the process ID on the service and killing it. This causes the service to go to a "Stopped" state. Then I used SC command (probably net start will work too) to start it successfully.

Some points to consider:

1. Since the service is hosted by "svchost" process, killing the process will bring down many other services (in my case 11 services overall) all in the same time.

2. This is more of a forceful stop situation, not a graceful stop. So if the services are in the middle of something, they won't probably be happy.

3. After starting the task scheduler service, I was looking for the rest of the services to start, but I saw that all of those 11 services came back after a few seconds. So you don't need to worry about starting all of the services. (Although it might not be your case, better to be careful with system services)

4. I still don't know if I've caused any problems in my box, but everything seems to be fine.

Comments

[HopelessN00b]

Are you running your command prompts elevated when using net and sc? If so, it sounds like you're out of options.

[Bender the Greatest]

I ended up just waiting until it was safe to reboot the server. If someone knows how to perform this operation without rebooting though it would be fantastic if they could offer an answer for my own knowledge and to help others who might come across this message

[Bender the Greatest]

Honestly, I haven't run into this issue again and I just rebooted the server once the workday was done. HaydnWVN below has a proposed solution that could work, but I haven't had the opportunity to try it.

[Hanno]

Thank you. This really saved my bacon and lots of hours trying to figure it out myself!

[Hanno]

This did not work for me - Access denied error persists.