NEED HELP FAST

[Jesper]

Hi guys, Im at a customer at the moment. One of the servers refuse to start. Every time I push the power button, it comes up and say "disk boot failure, insert system disk and press enter" I can hear the HDD´s are spinning up, and there is no disks in drive A:\ , neither are there in the cd-drive. What can be wrong??
Any help is helpful at the moment.

 

[jorecca]

I am not an expert but seems like your system cannot recognize the OS. You might want to leave the system down for awhile and then try powering it back up.

You might have to re-install your OS but this is only a suggestion, check with others before you do this.

 

[Thelemac]

I would double check the connections on your drives to make sure they're plugged into the mobo properly. Probably not the problem, but that would do it.

What led to this problem, do you know?

 

[Jesper]

No, I dont know what led to the problem.
The customer called and said his server wouldn´t start up this morning when he turned it on. Ill give it 20 more minuttes, or else Ill reinstall the system.

 

[Thelemac]

They turn their servers off?

How odd.

 

[Jesper]

Hehe yeah.
Its not a very big company. And the manager is very "money minded". He believe he can save some money by turning off the server every night. heh, you didnt hear this from me

 

[Thelemac]

I used to get that problem every once in a while when my computer got shut off because of a power outage, whether it was on or off at the time. What I did to fix it was unplug it and try to start it, then plug it back in and it would boot fine. (Haven't had that problem in a long time, hehe, just remembered about it). Unplugged the power, that is.

 

[paparazi]

Obviously I don't know your hardware etc but I would reseat everything, all cable connections, memory etc
Then reset cmos and bios to failsafe defaults. Martin Just trying to help, sometimes falling short, I am only human after all.

 

[mistanapesis]

This used to happen to me all the time.....I know you have proboally checked this but it was loose IDE connector (cheap cable), used to happen every so often till I put in a new cable. If your unsure....Dont do it!

 

[garwain]

I'd
1) verify all power and IDE/SCSI connection to the drive
2) verify that the drive is set up properly in the BIOS
3) fdisk to verify that the right partition is active.
4) if all else fails, fdisk /mbr (depending on OS, might need a boot disk after)
5) still nothing? OS is messed up, do a repair if possible, otherwise re-install.

 

[fitfixer]

If this is an NT4 server and you have tried all of the above suggestions, checked the SCSI cables, reset the BIOS to defaults etc, try repairing NT4;
Boot the server to DOS with a Win98 EBD disk, choose the option to load the CD-ROM drivers
insert the NT4 install CD and find the i386 folder, use the commands;
cd i386 [enter]
winnt /b [enter]
This will start the NT4 install, choose the "Repair" option

This will attempt to repair the existing NT4 installation and save your data, it can also be used to restore the Admin
password if a new password is lost or forgotten

Rebooting a server every night is a bad idea, it leads to failures like this, when you get the system back on line ask your guy if he still thinks switching it off every night is a cheap option