Failed to register SharePoint services

Good day everyone,

ISSUE: I’m in the process of installing a stand alone instance of Sharepoint Foundation 2010 on a Windows Server 2008 R2 system for our Planview application. This is a test system (thank goodness) but I ran into an error (see subject line) and have looked it up online and found a few options to try but I’m not having any luck.

Troubleshooting: After researching the error and scouring the log files one of the most common messages were

“SPFarm.Local returned null.  This usually means that the server is not joined.  But, you can delete a server from the configdb without unjoining, which would mean that this machine still thinks it is joined.”

So, I tried running the following command stsadm -o spsearch -action stop unfortunately that didn’t work as it said it couldn’t find any services to stop.

I then checked the permissions on the folder where the stsadm was located and added my service account (which has admin rights and I am logged in with) and that didn’t help either. I’m now beginning to wonder if this server is super corrupted and I should just start with a fresh system as it is a VM?

A brief history: This test environment was originally located in a different domain and had to be moved to another one due to an OS licensing issue, after it was relocated the application pretty much went toes up and we couldn’t recover it. We decided to rebuild the system, set it up correctly (it wasn’t before) and since I’m the new application admin it would give me a chance to get in and understand the application a little better as we have an upgrade coming up. I’ll be honest, I know very little about Sharepoint so this is all new to me. So I thought I would reach out to the community and see if there is any other ideas that could be offered. If the system is deemed far to corrupted, I’ll just have a new one spun up. I also included the two main log files as they may contain more info than what I see.