Syspolicy_purge_history - Step3 - Erase Phantom System Health Records. - FAILS.

Question

Hello, recently uninstalled all of SQL 2008 Shared features components in leaving just the SQL engine intact.
Afterwards notice the syspolicy_purge_history job has been failing at Step3 mentioning:
The process could not be created for step 3 of job 0x6F6178461B7373468A20C1DB8A6F5C83 (reason: The system cannot find the file specified).  The step failed.
Does anyone know how this can be fixed?
Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

Hi techresearch7777777,
The error could be caused by that the SQLPS.exe file cannot be found. Please perform the below steps to troubleshoot this issue.
1. Execute the following statements to check the location of SQLPS.exe file.
SELECT * FROM msdb.dbo.syssubsystems WHERE start_entry_point ='PowerShellStart'
2. Verify the 'SQLPS.exe' file is located in the path as per step 1.
3. If you cannot find the SQLPS.exe in the path above, search for SQLPS.exe on the server.
    a. If the SQLPS.exe file exists on the server, correct the path recorded in the msdb.dbo.syssubsystems table by using the following statements, then restart SQL Server Agent Service and check if there are some issues with syspolicy_purge_history
job.
Use msdb;
GO
sp_configure 'allow updates', 1 ;
RECONFIGURE WITH OVERRIDE ;
GO
UPDATE msdb.dbo.syssubsystems SET agent_exe='<full_path>' WHERE start_entry_point ='PowerShellStart';
GO
sp_configure 'allow updates', 0;
RECONFIGURE WITH OVERRIDE ;
GO
    b. If the SQLPS.exe doesn’t exists on the server, I suspect that it has been uninstalled. In order to obtain SQLPS module , you need to install the SQL Server 2008 Feature Pack.
Thanks,
Lydia Zhang
Lydia Zhang
TechNet Community Support