Developement environment failing to initiailize

We are trying to set up an up-to-date development environment by taking a copy of our production database and tree. I have gone through the migration manual and followed the steps - double checked - and followed the steps again but we are still not getting to the intialisation stage. Neither of the logs (server or console) update? All we are getting is the following:

'Failed to connect to server localhost:9995 (see attached image)

Has anyone had this error before?