Background:

My client has an old Pentium III Windows 2003 server whose 16/36 GB disks are dying. On it he has a database-driven web site and email application that needs further customization by a developer (me). First we need to get it working on the new server. The original developer is no longer available to provide a system setup guide. So my client got a tech who imaged the old drives over to the new server and managed to get it booting. But the IIS-driven site no longer works. In fact it seems that IIS itself does not work.

Problem:

Service Unavailable when attempting to browse from the server itself to the URL for a local Web Site called test which I setup in IIS to serve a single static index.htm file. This I did to isolate the problem, and eliminate the client's application from the equation. The site is setup on port 80 with the host header "test.myclientsdomain.com", and I used the etc\hosts file to point that host at the local IP. I know the host entry took effect because I can ping it.

When doing an iisreset, I get:

Attempting start...
Restart attempt failed.
IIS Admin Service or a service dependent on IIS Admin is not active.  It most likely failed to start, which may mean that it's disabled.

Despite this message, the services all stay in the Started state. The only relevant System event logs I found are:

Event Type: Error
Event Source:   W3SVC
Event Category: None
Event ID:   1002
Date:       11/4/2012
Time:       11:04:47 PM
User:       N/A
Computer:   ALPHA1
Description:
Application pool 'DefaultAppPool' is being automatically disabled due to a series of failures in the process(es) serving that application pool.

Event Type: Error
Event Source:   W3SVC
Event Category: None
Event ID:   1039
Date:       11/4/2012
Time:       11:13:12 PM
User:       N/A
Computer:   ALPHA1
Description:
A process serving application pool 'DefaultAppPool' reported a failure. The process id was '5636'.  The data field contains the error number.

Data:
0000: 7e 00 07 80               ~..    

And one Application event log:

Event Type: Error
Event Source:   Windows SharePoint Services 2.0
Event Category: None
Event ID:   1000
Date:       11/4/2012
Time:       11:34:04 PM
User:       N/A
Computer:   ALPHA1
Description:
#50070: Unable to connect to the database STS_Config on ALPHA2\SharePoint.  Check the database connection information and make sure that the database server is running.

That last log tells me that the tech may have initially tried to have both the old and the new server running, by renaming the new server from ALPHA1 to ALPHA2. And perhaps SharePoint grabbed onto that change, and now can't tell that the machine name has been switched back to the old ALPHA1. But why would SharePoint interfere with a static IIS web site serving a single HTML file? The test site is not even within an Application pool (I clicked the Remove button.)

What I have tried/eliminated:

• No relevant services seem to be disabled: IIS Admin, WWW Publishing, Sharepoint Timer
• Giving Full Control to All Users/Everyone on the c:\inetpub\test folder serving my test site.
• I can connect to and query the local SharePoint config database (ALPHA1\SHAREPOINT\STS_CONFIG) from SSMS. But when I try to do stsadm -o setconfigdb -connect -databaseserver ALPHA1\SHAREPOINT it tells me The SharePoint admininstration port does not exist. Please use stsadm.exe to create it. And when I do that, using the port 9487 specified in the IIS SharePoint Admin site config, it tells me the port is already in use. Needless to say, simply browsing to the admin site gives me a similar error about being unable to reach the config database. I didn't want to go further down the SharePoint path as it may be completed unrelated to my IIS issue, and I don't even know yet if SharePoint is required for this application to work. The app itself is ASP.Net/C#/Silverlight and a little MS Word integration (maybe that's where the SharePoint stuff comes in.)