I recently had an issue with my new installation of SSMS 2014. Right after I installed it, I imported my list of Registered Servers. I use this all the time to keep track of all of the several servers I manage. If you are interested. The below are two good articles about Registered Servers and why they are a great addition to your tool belt.
Good basic article:
http://sqlmag.com/sql-server/using-registered-servers-ssms
Pretty comprehensive article with examples of ways to do multi-server scripting.
https://www.simple-talk.com/sql/sql-tools/registered-servers-and--central-management-server-stores/
So what was my problem?
I was working with my list of Registered Servers when it disappeared. Poof! Everything gone. No root or anything to work with, and no way to get it to come back.
At first this was irritating but not too bad, but the longer I went without my Registered Servers, the more I missed them.
I could find nowhere online where anyone mentioned this problem, just mentioned turning on and off the window for Registered Servers, which wasn't my problem. Finally, I felt it was worth it and started trying to do repair installs on SSMS. In the end I did multiple repair/uninstall/reinstall cycles and even upgraded my install from just SSMS 2014 to the full Developer Edition.
Nothing worked!
It turns out that the actual file that controls the Registered Servers list is stored in your profile and that mine had somehow gotten corrupted, and if you uninstall and reinstall it doesn't do anything to it! It was not an easy file to find, though, afterwards, I saw that it is listed in the Simple Talk article, I only found that out afterwards.
So, what is this file and where is it located?
The file is RegSrvr.xml. Where it is located varies depending on your O/S (as mentioned in the Simple Talk article).
On my system running Windows 7. It is located in:
C:\Users\<login>\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Microsoft SQL Server\120\Tools\Shell
Yeah, it isn't grouped with
C:\Users\<login>\AppData\Local\Microsoft\SQL Server Management Studio
where most of the other settings are. That would be too easy. And since I didn't know the name of the file, I couldn't just use search to find it.
Finally, I did find it and copied over it with the one from my 2012 SSMS install which was still working. I'm still not clear how it got corrupted or why, but once I had a good copy, everything worked again.
So, I'm posting this so that if anyone else has a similar problem that they will hopefully spend less time getting it fixed.
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