The IIS Admin Service service terminated with service-specific error 2149648394 (0x8021080A).

I recently had the unexpected pleasure of losing my IIS Admin server - altogether!!! Translate - 150% !!!

Now, before this - everything was going great - except. During an upgrade of MOSS (Microsoft Office SharePoint Server) I encounted an issue that forced me to restore a VPC image - essentially bringing over another copy of the VHD and firing the server back up.

Interstingly, during that reboot - which for all intents should have gone fine - I see a hoard of DSKCHK processes running. Invariably, something got out of wack on the NTFS volumn between my shutting the image down and bringing it back up. During the 'fixing' process - a number of files invaribly can become corrupt - and the Metabase.xml - the blood-life of your IIS Admin service - is no exception. SO

Check in C:\Windows\System32\Inetsrv and you'll find a 'History' folder. Within here - hopefully - you'll find fairly recent backups of the Metabase.XML and MBSchema.XML objects. Before doing the following - be sure to backup the existing Metabase.xml and MBSchema.xml from C:\Windows\System32\Inetsrv first.

Now, rename a recent backup from the 'History' folder - renaming a recently Metabase.XML object, and then a recent MBSchema.XML object. Copy / Paste each of these to the C:\Windows\System32\Inetsrv.