Start-Service : Failed to start service 'Microsoft Service Fabric Host Service (FabricHostSvc)'

I also fought with this problem just this morning. I did NOT have to reinstall Windows.

I too found events in the event log talking about corrupt performance counters. I'm not sure if it's related or not but I ran this command from a cmd windows as administrator to rebuild the performance counters and the error clear up:

lodctr /r

I then went to Programs and Features and uninstalled anything that mentioned Service Fabric.

I then reinstalled the Service Fabric SDK and followed the instrucions on the Azure Service Fabric environment setup page here and my cluster started working fine.

I was facing the same issue and tried many times one evening and next morning I got the answer. Well the answer is "Ensure that Firewall is on".

UPDATE2: This is a very old issue and I have not seen this reoccur since Nov 2015. (added just so this post doesn't get down-voted any more :-/ ).

UPDATE: I have not had this issue since the November update.

ORIGINAL:I had this issue the other day and tried everything. I had uninstalled, rebooted, reinstalled everything from Service Fabric down to Azure SDK's and Visual Studio.

The fix - pretty bad. Reinstall windows.

At one point, I found a trace that indicated a registry corruption. Something about unable to find a performance counter.

Right now I have a new issue (which I'll post separately) but just repeating here to let people know there is some buggy infrastructure under this service right now.... My stateful/stateless app deploys. The stateless app deploys and runs. The stateful service deploys but will not replicate. If I run exactly the same code on another machine (and I mean copy/paste to other machine then run it), it all works.