Hello folks - I have a similar problem with my box. This was working fine before the weekend.

The server is a VM, sharing a drive with a number of other VM's. We had a major windows update pack applied on Saturday. 100's of patches that had not been applied for a few months. This filled up the physical disc where the servers were running and they all shut down unexpectedly.

We freed up some disc space and restarted the OS, but SQL server services did not start up. Trying to restart them manually gives me this message in the even log:

A file activation error occurred. The physical file name 'E:\MSSQL\MSSQL10_50.MSSQLSERVER\MSSQL\Binn\mssqlsystemresource.ldf' may be incorrect. Diagnose and correct additional errors, and retry the operation.

Trying to start SQL server from cmd: sqlservr -T3608 gives the following message multiple times:

Error: 17058, Severty: 16, State: 1.

initerrlog Could not open error log file ''.

Operating system error = 3(failed to retrieve text for this error. Reason 15105).

I have checked and the file exists at: 'E:\MSSQL\MSSQL10_50.MSSQLSERVER\MSSQL\Binn\mssqlsystemresource.ldf' so not sure what I can do about that.

Can anyone help?