Over an hour and counting for a Win2003 server boot...

[Dollie]

On my way in this morning, I got a call that our server was down and needed to be rebooted. When I got in about 10 minutes later, it was still applying network settings. I was told that it installed Windows Updates when it was shutting down.

That was over an hour ago. The window showing the startup progress went away about a half hour ago and now I have an arrow, an occasional hourglass, and that's it. Our DNS, DHCP, Active Directory, and other services including mapped drives on the server are available (those took about 20 min to come up), but it's still not booted up completely!

Any ideas of what could be causing this? Should I manually power it off and try to boot again or am I probably looking at the same thing happening? Since this is our main server, I really don't want to reboot and take the entire office down for another half hour, and my pacing, cursing, and grumbling hasn't made it any faster. I'm contemplating contacting the Guiness people and see what kind of record I'm looking at...

Thanks in advance if anyone's got any ideas!

 

[cpjust]

Can you get into it with Remote Desktop?

Are any critical services still down?
If not, I'd probably wait until the end of the day, and if it's still in the same state, try running the shutdown command from another computer to remotely reboot it. Only do a hard reboot if you absolutely need to.

 

[Dollie]

Remote connections aren't enabled on the machine (kicking myself). I just tried to be sure, and got an error.

We just hit 2 hours on the reboot, and I'm getting ill...

 

[pagy]

Does this server have any powerchute software on it??

Paul
MCSE


"Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I'm not sure about the the universe."
Albert Einstein

 

[itsp1965]

Yeah I had this happen to me during a patch install once. What I ended up doing was disconnecting the network connection and proceeded to logon locally. Checked the event logs (nothing particular was found). Re-connected the cable and proceeded to reboot and it came up fine.

 

[Dollie]

No powerchute software, we've already been down that java licensing road about 2 years ago.

It hasn't even gotten to the logon screen yet.... HD light blinks occasionally (like regular usage, not boot usage), and the hourglass pops up just to humor me. If I get the opportunity to try and reboot at lunchtime I will.

 

[Dollie]

Update:

I gave up waiting when our mapped drives dropped into the abyss and did a manual shutdown. Booted it back up, and never got the login screen.

Booted again, F8 and selected safe mode. OK, it boots in safe mode, check out event log. Lots of Windows updates (server has not been rebooted since last week's flood of updates). Reboot again to last known good config, and voila!

So, I've pretty much determined it's one of the Windows updates that has come out over the last two weeks. I'm going to try to reinstall them, one at a time, after the work week is over on Friday evening.

I'll update this thread again when I find the update that killed it.

Thanks for your suggestions! I really do appreciate it greatly!

 

[cpjust]

Don't forget to run CHKDSK to see if the reboot messed anything up...

 

[Dollie]

I've got CHKDSK scheduled to run the next time I reboot. I should probably do this before I run any updates.

 

[juniper911]

Disable your automatic updates!!!

And use a test server to see what the updates do to a server before you go to the live. If you dont have a test environment then manually pick out the security updates that you need, you dont need all the ones that come out on Patch Tuesday.

 

[Dollie]

I guess I got a little spoiled with our Win2K server (as well as the NT4 server before it) because I never encountered an update they didn't like. This is the first time I've had a problem with updates and I'm already gun shy. I even turned off the basic notification for the updates. So now everything's off and I'm now looking at reallocating at least some of my time to investigating patches and seeing what they affect before downloading and installing them.

I'm not sure who I should thank for having to add a few hours of nonsense to my week, but something tells me that the initials BG and MS are involved.

If this turns out to be the DST patch I'm going to laugh if I don't cry first!