I'm not sure if the cause was the same, but I was experiencing the same issues getting an ArcGIS Server 10.1 service started after we had a power outage overnight. When the server was restarted, a previously fine ArcGIS Server install would no-longer work.
The ArcGIS Service would not start and the Windows Application event logs had the same message as described above, which is next to useless.
After a LOT of digging, I discovered that the Server service was failing on startup as it attempted to initalise a Logging service, presumably used by ArcGIS Server when it gets going.
I found this out by running the C:\Program Files\ArcGIS\Server\framework\etc\scripts\startup.bat file which is used to start the ArcGIS Server Service. When run in a Command window, you should be able to see any errors starting the service.
Any errors are also logged here: C:\Program Files\ArcGIS\Server\framework\etc\service\logs
Inside the service_error.log file in that folder, was an exception outlining failures when attempting to use an invalid JSON string.
I eventually found where that was coming from by searching for *.json files.
In this directory:
C:\Program Files\ArcGIS\Server\framework\etc
there are some JSON configuration files, one of which was empty, namely arcgis-logsettings.json.
Once I had put the correct content in that file, copied from another ArcGIS Server instance, the service started fine.
The content of my file is:
{
"logDir": "C:\\arcgisserver\\logs\\",
"logLevel": "WARNING",
"maxErrorReportsCount": 10,
"maxLogFileAge": 90
}
Hope that helps somone!
cheers
Ewan