Difference between sc start ... and Start-Service ... in PowerShell 2

Question

I have a few different services installed on the same machine. I'm writing a PowerShell 2 script to start and stop them.

For some of the services, I can use Start-Service -displayname "the service" to successfully start it. On others, using the Start-Service cmdlet causes and error along the lines of "Cannot start service ... on computer '.'".

In the cases that I get an error using the Start-Service cmdlet, sc start "the service" always succeeds.

Vice versa is also true (although sc start doesn't return any errors--it just doesn't start the service at all.)

Is there any difference between these commands? Is there an alternative command I should be using? Finally, can I 'catch' any errors from the cmdlet and just include both commands to cover all the bases?

This problem is repeatable for me, even if I uninstall and reinstall the service.

Thanks!

Answer 1

I'm not sure the differences between sc start and start-service, but you can use wmi to do what you want.

To start the service:

(get-wmiobject win32_service -filter "name='the service'").startService()

To stop the service:

(get-wmiobject win32_service -filter "name='the service'").stopService()

To check the status of a service, you can use:

get-wmiobject win32_service -filter "name='the service'"

It will show you the state and also the start mode. If you want to automate this, you can use the following.

To stop the service:

if ((get-wmiobject win32_service -filter "name='the service'").state -eq "Running") {
    (get-wmiobject win32_service -filter "name='the service'").stopService()
} # Stops the service if it is running

To start the service:

if ((get-wmiobject win32_service -filter "name='the service'").state -eq "Stopped") {
    (get-wmiobject win32_service -filter "name='the service'").startService()
} # starts the service if it is stopped

I'm sure you can modify those to suit your needs.

The reason I like to use wmi is the ability to specify -computername and -credentials. It makes it so you can access a remote system and authenticate to it if you have non-domain systems. Hope that helped. Have a great day!