SSRS Service not running

Do you have SSRS installed with each instance of SQL Server, or are all these instances part of a scale-out deployment? If you originally did a scale-out deployment and then later attempted to uninstall one instance without removing it from the scale-out settings, that could cause problems. Not sure that's the case here, but something that stuck out to me.

If that's the case, you might see the old server name listed in the scale-out settings when you manage one of the working instances - if you can't remove the server from that screen, you could try these steps:

http://milehighdba.blogspot.com/2011/06/remove-server-from-ssrs-scale-out.html

If these are independent instances, though, and not tied together in their configuration, there's no reason that one server should depend on any other - you mention that it appears in the configuration files, but each instance's config should mention only things related to that one instance.

It isn't part of a scale out (never was). Each is part of their own instance.  The weird thing is the rest of the GENERAL instance is gone (no DB or anything), but SSRS was left behind. When using configuration manager the GENERAL SSRS instance all points to the BACKOFFICE DB, which is odd. I can't just un point it because I have no where else to point it at.

In any case I have a case open with Microsoft, since this is pretty jacked up and a production box.

Also i did try to do what was in that blog. But it never works. Both instances are listed with -l but when I try to remove GENERAL it completes successfully only to come back in the list. Looks like a botched scale out was done by a predecessor, hopefully MS can clean it up.

Ah, maybe there's some confusion here - the SSRS service can be installed as part of a named instance, but the databases can be placed on any SQL instance you want. While they're usually placed on the same named instance of SQL Server as the SSRS service, that's not at all a requirement. Could it be the case that the instance of SSRS you're trying to remove is set up to use databases on a different SQL Database Engine service? I'm not sure why that would make a difference at all - you should be able to remove the service and leave the databases in place - but that might be contributing to the confusion.

Do you have an SSRS instance that's configured and working properly? If not, you might just want to remove the feature from all your instances, make sure everything is cleared out, and then re-add the feature to those instances using the SQL installer (or set up new instances containing only SSRS). I know that's a bit brute-force, but it may resolve your problem if you have nothing to lose.

If I open Reporting Services Configuration Manager, the GENEREAL service shows the same DB connect, Report Server Virtual Directory, and Report Manager Virtual Directory. Then only thing different is the service since they are separate. Like you I came to the conclusion to just uninstall that RS instance since it is not needed or desired. However, I've tried to uninstall it, and it goes through without error, but it still shows back up when you run setup.  At this point I'll let MS take the con and get rid of it for good.

I'll toss you the points since you tried. But here is what the issue(s) were in case it helps others.

The bulk of the problem (that we didn't find until way late) was that in IIS the BACKOFFICE site(s) were pointed to the GENERAL directory. Hence when you browsed to http://myserver/ReportServer$BACKOFFICE, it was really opening the $GENERAL site. Since both were using the same DB it sorta worked. That was really the fix we pointed it to the correct directory, did a delete encrypted content (requiring connectors to be rebuilt manually but we only had 1).

But in order to disable the unneeded GENERAL SSRS what we did was using config manager, we created a new DB, and Virtual drive/Site, and pointed GENERAL to that. Then we were able to disable and stop that service, and to be double sure I also took the newly created DB's offline. Since we are moving to 2012 by end of year that was good enough for me.