I was recently setting up a Capacity Assessment for a client when I ran into an issue with perfmon. Perfmon is used on the physical windows servers to collect performance information. This information is used to help determine the best route (design, hardware specs., etc.) to virtualization for the physical servers. However, upon trying to collect the information on some systems I received an error that the performance counter “object was not found.” The VMware Capacity Planner data manager will tell you that this error is usually due to traffic not getting through a firewall or anti-virus product on the server.
I did some digging and found that the firewall was not the problem. I opened up perfmon directly on the problem servers and found numbers for counters instead of the names. This told me that I had corrupt counters. The fix in this case was really simple. I copied the counters (*.dat files) from a server that the performance metrics were working on (same OS) to the problem servers.
The two files in question are %systemroot%\system32\perfc009.dat and %systemroot%\system32\perfh009.dat.
Once these files were replaced with the ones from the good server, I restarted perfmon and the counters were there. The data collection could continue. There is a chance that you may need to dig a little deeper to restore the counters in your specific scenario. The following Microsoft KB article should help: KB300956