SQL Server Object Explorer closes immediately in Visual Studio – Error 0x8007007B and SQL Server Express installation fails

Question

SQL Server Object Explorer closes immediately in Visual Studio – Error 0x8007007B and SQL Server Express installation fails

Søren Dyrbye 0

Details: I am experiencing an issue with Visual Studio where I cannot create or manage databases.

When I open Visual Studio and go to View → SQL Server Object Explorer, a popup window briefly appears and then immediately closes again. This keeps repeating until I close Visual Studio completely. In the popup window, I can see the error code 0x8007007B.

Because of this, I cannot access or create databases inside Visual Studio.

I have already tried several things to fix the issue:

Uninstalling and reinstalling Visual Studio

Installing different versions (Visual Studio 2022 and the newest version)

Resetting my PC completely

However, the problem still occurs.

I also tried installing Microsoft SQL Server Express (2025 and 2022) manually, but the installation fails with the following error:

Error: unable to install SQL Server (setup.exe)

Exit code (decimal): -2061893606

Error description: Wait on the database engine recovery handle failed

The strange thing is that everything works fine on my desktop PC, but I have this issue on my laptop.

Has anyone experienced something similar or knows what could cause this?

Any help would be greatly appreciated.Details:

I am experiencing an issue with Visual Studio where I cannot create or manage databases.

When I open Visual Studio and go to View → SQL Server Object Explorer, a popup window briefly appears and then immediately closes again. This keeps repeating until I close Visual Studio completely. In the popup window, I can see the error code 0x8007007B.

Because of this, I cannot access or create databases inside Visual Studio.

I have already tried several things to fix the issue:

Uninstalling and reinstalling Visual Studio

Installing different versions (Visual Studio 2022 and the newest version)

Resetting my PC completely

However, the problem still occurs.

I also tried installing Microsoft SQL Server Express (2025 and 2022) manually, but the installation fails with the following error:

Error: unable to install SQL Server (setup.exe)

Exit code (decimal): -2061893606

Error description: Wait on the database engine recovery handle failed

The strange thing is that everything works fine on my desktop PC, but I have this issue on my laptop.

Has anyone experienced something similar or knows what could cause this?

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

1 answer

Your answer

Answer 1

Erland Sommarskog 133.1K MVP Volunteer Moderator

The message Wait on the Database Engine recovery handle failed that you get when you install SQL Server is a generic error that means that SQL Server did not start when Setup wanted to run configuration steps. To understand why it did not start, you need to look in the SQL Server errorlog, which you find in C:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\MSSQL17.SQLEXPRESS\MSSQL\LOG\ERRORLOG.

If you see a message about 256 misaligned reads, you are running into a known issue where Windows 11 for some disk drives reports a sector size that SQL Server does not cope with. Microsoft has published an article with workarounds for the problem.

If you don't see the message about misaligned reads, feel free to upload the errorlog here, so we can look at it. You will need to rename to ERRORLOG.txt for the forum software to accept it.

Søren Dyrbye 0 Reputation points

2026-03-05T21:48:26.3266667+00:00
Ill get this messege:
2026-03-05 18:59:47.11 Server Microsoft SQL Server 2025 (RTM) - 17.0.1000.7 (X64)

Oct 21 2025 12:05:57 Copyright (C) 2025 Microsoft Corporation Express Edition (64-bit) on Windows 10 Home 10.0 <X64> (Build 26200: ) (Hypervisor)

2026-03-05 18:59:47.11 Server UTC adjustment: 1:00

2026-03-05 18:59:47.11 Server (c) Microsoft Corporation.

2026-03-05 18:59:47.11 Server All rights reserved.

2026-03-05 18:59:47.11 Server Server process ID is 9356.

2026-03-05 18:59:47.11 Server System Manufacturer: 'LENOVO', System Model: '83K0'.

2026-03-05 18:59:47.11 Server Authentication mode is WINDOWS-ONLY.

2026-03-05 18:59:47.11 Server Logging SQL Server messages in file 'C:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\MSSQL17.SQLEXPRESS\MSSQL\Log\ERRORLOG'.

2026-03-05 18:59:47.11 Server The service account is 'NT Service\MSSQL$SQLEXPRESS'. This is an informational message; no user action is required.

2026-03-05 18:59:47.11 Server Registry startup parameters:

-d C:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\MSSQL17.SQLEXPRESS\MSSQL\DATA\master.mdf -e C:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\MSSQL17.SQLEXPRESS\MSSQL\Log\ERRORLOG -l C:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\MSSQL17.SQLEXPRESS\MSSQL\DATA\mastlog.ldf

2026-03-05 18:59:47.11 Server Command Line Startup Parameters:

-s "SQLEXPRESS"

2026-03-05 18:59:47.11 Server SQL Server detected 1 sockets with 8 cores per socket and 16 logical processors per socket, 16 total logical processors; using 8 logical processors based on SQL Server licensing. This is an informational message; no user action is required.

2026-03-05 18:59:47.11 Server SQL Server is starting at normal priority base (=7). This is an informational message only. No user action is required.

2026-03-05 18:59:47.11 Server Using conventional memory in the memory manager.

2026-03-05 18:59:47.11 Server SQL Server detected the following NUMA node configuration (NUMA Node number 0, Processor Group number 0, CPU Mask 0x000000000000ffff).

2026-03-05 18:59:47.11 Server Page exclusion bitmap is enabled.

2026-03-05 18:59:47.21 Server Detected 24236 MB of RAM, 16463 MB of available memory, 19597 MB of available page file. This is an informational message; no user action is required.

2026-03-05 18:59:47.22 Server Buffer Pool: Allocating 33554432 bytes for 3129986 hashPages.

2026-03-05 18:59:47.23 Server Default collation: SQL_Latin1_General_CP1_CI_AS (us_english 1033)

2026-03-05 18:59:47.32 Server Buffer pool extension is already disabled. No action is necessary.

2026-03-05 18:59:47.36 Server Skipping small memory environment configuration. State 1.

2026-03-05 18:59:47.40 Server CPU vectorization level(s) detected: SSE SSE2 SSE3 SSSE3 SSE41 SSE42 AVX AVX2 POPCNT BMI1 BMI2

2026-03-05 18:59:47.43 Server Query Store settings initialized with enabled = 1,

2026-03-05 18:59:47.44 Server The maximum number of dedicated administrator connections for this instance is '1'

2026-03-05 18:59:47.47 Server This instance of SQL Server last reported using a process ID of 17728 at 05-03-2026 16:10:46 (local) 05-03-2026 15:10:46 (UTC). This is an informational message only; no user action is required.

2026-03-05 18:59:47.47 Server Node configuration: node 0: CPU mask: 0x00000000000000ff:0 Active CPU mask: 0x00000000000000ff:0. This message provides a description of the NUMA configuration for this computer. This is an informational message only. No user action is required.

2026-03-05 18:59:47.50 Server Using dynamic lock allocation. Initial allocation of 2500 Lock blocks and 5000 Lock Owner blocks per node. This is an informational message only. No user action is required.

2026-03-05 18:59:47.50 Server Lock partitioning is enabled. This is an informational message only. No user action is required.

2026-03-05 18:59:47.51 Server In-Memory OLTP initialized on standard machine.

2026-03-05 18:59:47.53 Server [INFO] Created Extended Events session 'hkenginexesession'

2026-03-05 18:59:47.53 Server Database Instant File Initialization: enabled. For security and performance considerations see the topic 'Database Instant File Initialization' in SQL Server Books Online. This is an informational message only. No user action is required.

2026-03-05 18:59:47.54 Server Total Log Writer threads: 2. This is an informational message; no user action is required.

2026-03-05 18:59:47.56 Server CLR version v4.0.30319 loaded.

2026-03-05 18:59:47.58 Server clwb is selected for pmem flush operation.

2026-03-05 18:59:47.58 Server Software Usage Metrics is disabled.

2026-03-05 18:59:47.59 spid27s Starting up database 'master'.

2026-03-05 18:59:47.60 spid27s There have been 256 misaligned log IOs which required falling back to synchronous IO. The current IO is on file C:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\MSSQL17.SQLEXPRESS\MSSQL\DATA\master.mdf.

2026-03-05 18:59:47.61 spid27s Hit Fatal Error: Server is terminating

2026-03-05 18:59:47.61 spid27s Unable to create stack dump file due to stack shortage (ex_terminator - Last chance exception handling)

2026-03-05 18:59:47.61 spid27s CImageHelper::DoMiniDump entered. Dump attempts: 1. 0x00000000

2026-03-05 18:59:47.61 spid27s Stack Signature for the dump is 0x0000000000000000

2026-03-05 18:59:47.61 spid27s SaveNumaNodeRelationShip : 0 of 1 numa nodes info saved to pDump.

2026-03-05 18:59:47.61 spid27s SQLDumperLibraryInvoke entered.

2026-03-05 18:59:47.61 spid27s CDmpDump::DumpInternal entered.

2026-03-05 18:59:47.61 spid27s CDmpClient::ExecuteAllCallbacks started.

2026-03-05 18:59:47.61 spid27s XE_DumpCallbacks is executing...

2026-03-05 18:59:47.62 Server Common language runtime (CLR) functionality initialized using CLR version v4.0.30319 from C:\Windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework64\v4.0.30319.

2026-03-05 18:59:47.63 spid27s DumpCallbackSOS is executing...

2026-03-05 18:59:47.63 spid27s DumpCallbackEE is executing...

2026-03-05 18:59:47.63 spid27s DumpCallbackSE is executing...

2026-03-05 18:59:47.63 spid27s DumpCallbackSEAM is executing...

2026-03-05 18:59:47.63 spid27s DumpCallbackSSB is executing...

2026-03-05 18:59:47.65 spid27s DumpCallbackQE is executing...

2026-03-05 18:59:47.65 spid27s DumpCallbackFullText is executing...

2026-03-05 18:59:47.65 spid27s DumpCallbackSQLCLR is executing...

2026-03-05 18:59:47.65 spid27s DumpCallbackHk is executing...

2026-03-05 18:59:47.65 spid27s DumpCallbackRepl is executing...

2026-03-05 18:59:47.65 spid27s DumpCallbackPolyBase is executing...

2026-03-05 18:59:47.65 spid27s CDmpClient::ExecuteAllCallbacks completed. Time elapsed: 0 seconds.

2026-03-05 18:59:47.65 spid27s InvokeSqlDumper entered.

2026-03-05 18:59:47.65 spid27s Invoking sqldumper.exe by CreateProcess ...

2026-03-05 18:59:47.98 Server External governance manager initialized

2026-03-05 18:59:47.98 Server Detected pause instruction latency: 136 cycles.

2026-03-05 18:59:48.30 spid27s sqldumper returned.

2026-03-05 18:59:48.30 spid27s External dump process return code 0x20000001.

External dump process returned no errors.
Erland Sommarskog 133.1K Reputation points MVP Volunteer Moderator

2026-03-05T21:54:39.55+00:00

2026-03-05 18:59:47.60 spid27s There have been 256 misaligned log IOs which required falling back to synchronous IO. The current IO is on file C:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\MSSQL17.SQLEXPRESS\MSSQL\DATA\master.mdf.

As I said above:

If you see a message about 256 misaligned reads, you are running into a known issue where Windows 11 for some disk drives reports a sector size that SQL Server does not cope with. Microsoft has published an article with workarounds for the problem.
Lakshmi Narayana Garikapati 920 Reputation points Microsoft External Staff Moderator

2026-03-10T09:19:06.7066667+00:00

HiSøren Dyrbye,

Following up to confirm if the earlier responses addressed your query. If not, please share your questions and we’ll assist further

Thanks,

Lakshmi.
Søren Dyrbye 0 Reputation points

2026-03-10T14:39:43.94+00:00

Hi Lakshmi
I had to reinstall windows, and then addres the "article with workarounds", and that solved the problem.
Ty for all the help

Søren

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SQL Server Object Explorer closes immediately in Visual Studio – Error 0x8007007B and SQL Server Express installation fails

1 answer

Your answer