The Windows Home ServerConsole cannot start because the Windows Home Server Storage Manager Service is not running

I recently saw some disk related errors on my Windows Home Server. Following the usual course of action, which is to check the disks using the folowing batch file:

net stop pdl
net stop whsbackup
chkdsk D: /x /r 
chkdsk C: /x /r
for /d %%1 in (C:\fs\*) do start chkdsk /x /r %%1

all seemed fine. Only minor disk problems were encountered (half a dozen unindexed files were indexed) on one disk.

Following a reboot at the end of the process however, I could not connect to the Home Server console. When I logged onto the server, I immediately saw a notice that one or more services had failed to start (never a good thing) and when I tried to start the console the message I received was

"The Windows Home ServerConsole cannot start because the Windows Home Server Storage Manager Service is not running. Please restart Windows Home Server. If the problem persists contact Product Support"

Following a reboot nothing had changed, I saw the same services related error and could not start the Home Server console.

I had a quick look at the services which had failed to start and could see quite a few Home Server related services which should have started, but hadn't. Working from the Windows Home Server Storage Manager service, I could see that of all of the dependencies, the only service which hadn't started was the Volume Shadow Copy service. This service was set to manual, but trying to start the service manually gave a 'the service did not respond in a timely fashion' error after only a second or so and I suspected that this was the root cause of the issue.

A search on the internet resulted in a few suggestions for patches to fix the issue. Trying KB826936 didn't help; the patch was rolled into one of the service packs that I already had installed. KB940349 however installed fine and following a reboot everything fired back into life!