WINDOWS 2003 DC/DNS Harddrive light on non-stop

[geist4]

I seem to have an issue with one of my DC/DNS servers that I can't pinpoint the problem or solution. The details are as follows:

I start seeing the event error 1058 on this server. (Windows can't access a group policy object - access is denied.)I have already worked through the trouble shooting in the folowing MS-KB Articles:

887303,830676,842804,842804,822158,815263,887429

Everything checks out ok. (I did find that my Antivirus exceptions were not configured. This has been corrected but it did not correct the problem. See:MS-KB 822158)

I have checked the System monitor for the hard disks and they very on the %Disk Time Counter from 0%-90% average 30%.

I ran Dr. Dos hard disk utils to check the health of the drives and they check out ok.

After I reboot the machine the hard disk light activity returns to normal and all the counters return to below 30%.... After about two weeks from the reboot the hard drive light will come on again and stays on.

These problems seemed to have started about a month after installing the last service pack and using the security configuration wizard.

 

[Smorgan11]

how much ram is in the server

 

[geist4]

This server has 512

 

[geist4]

Here is an update on the problem - System Monitor reported a lot of page faults were occuring after about 12 hours from the last reboot.


Sys Monitor Details Before Reboot:


Page Faults/sec Max:1K (and higher) Average: 984


Sys Monitor Details After Reboot:

Page Faults/sec Max: 200 Average: 16


I increased the RAM by 128MB as a test. (I have more memory on order)This did not correct the problem with the IDE hard drive light. However the page faults are now running Max: 300 and Average: 32 after 12 hours from a reboot.

One interesting note is I have disabled the network connection on several of these occasions for 45 seconds, immediately the hard drive light goes out, when I re-enabled it it seems to work correctly (hard drive light and activity) for approximately 12 hours.

 

[geist4]

http://www.sysinternals.com

I found some great free Helpful tools there


Ok - so thanks to SI’s file monitor I have determined the issue.

File monitor was reporting a non-stop read on a remote share and then a write to a local drive c:\Windows\CSC!! Client Side Cache - Offline Files were not properly configured correctly and it was trying to synch a backup (.bkf) file everyday after the ntbackup was finished with it. After I got rid of the offline file copy and reduced the amount of hard disk space to 0% for OL files the hard drive light went out and stayed out. (Note: I put an exception in group policy to prevent .bkf files from synching)

On the 1058 error I opened the hosts file and added a line for each of my dns servers:

000.000.000.00 domainsname.com


Thanks for reading.