ADFS fails to start after reboot.

Question

We've had an issue for a while now where ADFS fails to start on our server. It's pretty intermittent, but it does cause a work when it happens.

When it happens, we have to restart WID, then start ADFS manually.

We have SentinelOne installed. We've removed Defender. We've set ADFS to a delayed start. This is what we were told to do by SentinelOne. They asked that we get with MS to see if we could enable debug logging for ADFS/WID. We haven't been able to get this information from MS.

Has anyone else ran into this? Does anyone have a fix?

Thank you!

Answer 1

Dear Team,

This is a known problem with ADFS when running on Windows Internal Database (WID): after a reboot, the ADFS service sometimes starts before the WID service is fully up, causing ADFS to fail. That’s why manually starting WID, then ADFS, works.

Permanent fix: Set the ADFS service to depend on the WID service. This forces Windows to wait for WID before starting ADFS.

How to do it:

1. Open Command Prompt as Administrator.
2. Run this command:

      
      sc config adfssrv depend= "MSSQL$MICROSOFT##WID"
   

3. Reboot the server.

Best Regards,