Right after setting up SQL Server 2005 cluster on Windows 2008; the FTE Services did not start up automatically. Following error gets recorded in the event log/cluster events:
Cluster resource ‘SQL Server Fulltext (InstanceName)’ in clustered service or application ‘VirtualClusterName’ failed.
Generic application ‘SQL Server Fulltext (InstanceName)’ could not be brought online (with error ‘1075’) during an attempt to start the service. Possible cause: the specified service parameters might be invalid.
Microsoft Engineer pointed me to KB936302, Problem #3; however said solution of install SP2 was not enough. The services still refused to come online, to make it so services started successfully we edited following registry entry:
Key: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\MSFTESQL$InstanceName\
Multi-String Value: DependsOnService
Value Changed from …
NTLMSSP
RPCSS
to
RPCSS
Rebooted each node; services came on successfully.
SQL Canada (SQLCAN) 
i am in the midst of installing SQL 2005 on Server 2008. It is installed, however, the SQL Server and SQL Server Agent service will not start. I can get the SQL Server service to start if I use the Services console. But, if I try to start the resource in the cluster manager if fails. I cannot get the Sql Agent to start at all. I cannot install SP2 because it wants to start the Sql Server service and it can't, so it just hangs and waits. I have verified that the Sql service account has access to the SQL folder. I have verified that the Instance and Virtual Server name are correct in the registry. I have manually removed NTLMSSp from the MSFTESQL$(GUI) entry in the registry. I have rebooted all nodes. Still these resources will not come online. Can you help? Is this something that you may have run into?
It can be a bit annoying trying to troubleshoot SQL Server 2005 cluster start up issues. In many cases looking at ERRORLOG is helpful; so in your SQL install at MSSQL\MSSQL.1\LOG\ please note down the error and I can see if I have seen similar issues.
Hello,This is clearly explained in the following KB article – http://support.microsoft.com/kb/936302and is a "known issue".To fix the issue, DO NOT make any changes like the ones you did above. Install SQL Server 2005 SP2 and that should fix it !
Hi Sudarsha,We did install SP2 it still did not resolve the issue; that is why we ended up making the registry change. The engineer at that time from Microsoft told me I shouldn't need RPCSS and since I think it was around 3AM I didn't get too deeply into the reasoning. Recently I actually setup another instance on Windows 2008, 64-bit cluster. The Full Text Services failed to start again; server was patched to SP2 with no luck. So I made similar registry change to get FTE working on cluster.
did you make the reg chnge on each node of the cluster?
Yes, I believe so. This is instance based entry; so if you are running multi-instance cluster you'll need to adjust that on each node.P.S. I fixed the key in the document above it should be HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\MSFTESQL$InstanceName\ from HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\MSFESQL$InstanceName\.