BadBoy House
Member
- Reaction score
- 3
We came in to the office today and our APC UPS battery had blown. No big deal we thought - we shut down both of our servers, took the UPS out, connected the servers to to the mains via a power surge protector and powered them back on.
The member server (Windows Server 2008), which runs our main line of business databases rebooted fine back into Windows.
Our domain controller, which is running SBS 2008, gets stuck on a black screen during boot up. Specifically, it passes the POST and RAID stages and gets to the usual Windows startup progress bar on the black background.
The progress bar goes along for about 30 seconds at which point it goes to a completely black screen and goes no further. We left it for a good 50 minutes without any change. We then hard powered it off.
We tried restarting it again but it dis exactly the same.
This server was running absolutely fine before we powered it down the first time.
We started troubleshooting immediately:
- Last known good (no difference)
- vga mode (no difference)
- Safe Mode (went to the black screen still but also displayed the mouse pointer, which could be moved around)
- Restored last nights backup (no difference).
- Unplugged all USB devices and the Ethernet cable.
- Ping and RDP to the server both fail.
We're currently restoring a backup from last week - it's about half way through.
The only thing that was done on the server this week was the installation of some Windows Updates on Wednesday- these did not require a restart.
When we checked the server first thing before shutting it down, there were no errors or warnings in the event longs showing any signs of problems.
We opened a paid support ticket with Microsoft Support and they said that the steps we'd taken so far would be what they would have suggested. We've got to call them back if the restore from last week doesn't work.
My theories for the cause at the moment are:
1. A Windows Update is causing the issue.
2. There is some corruption in Windows that only exhibits a problem during boot up.
3. Hard drive failure. The server has Raid 1 mirroring with two 300GB SAS drives. We have ordered two 600GB SAS drives anyway to try and will benefit from the extra space.
The server itself is a Dell PoweEdge T410 with a Xeon processor and 16GB RAM.
Has anyone encountered something like this before?
Appreciate any advice or suggestions.
Cheers.
The member server (Windows Server 2008), which runs our main line of business databases rebooted fine back into Windows.
Our domain controller, which is running SBS 2008, gets stuck on a black screen during boot up. Specifically, it passes the POST and RAID stages and gets to the usual Windows startup progress bar on the black background.
The progress bar goes along for about 30 seconds at which point it goes to a completely black screen and goes no further. We left it for a good 50 minutes without any change. We then hard powered it off.
We tried restarting it again but it dis exactly the same.
This server was running absolutely fine before we powered it down the first time.
We started troubleshooting immediately:
- Last known good (no difference)
- vga mode (no difference)
- Safe Mode (went to the black screen still but also displayed the mouse pointer, which could be moved around)
- Restored last nights backup (no difference).
- Unplugged all USB devices and the Ethernet cable.
- Ping and RDP to the server both fail.
We're currently restoring a backup from last week - it's about half way through.
The only thing that was done on the server this week was the installation of some Windows Updates on Wednesday- these did not require a restart.
When we checked the server first thing before shutting it down, there were no errors or warnings in the event longs showing any signs of problems.
We opened a paid support ticket with Microsoft Support and they said that the steps we'd taken so far would be what they would have suggested. We've got to call them back if the restore from last week doesn't work.
My theories for the cause at the moment are:
1. A Windows Update is causing the issue.
2. There is some corruption in Windows that only exhibits a problem during boot up.
3. Hard drive failure. The server has Raid 1 mirroring with two 300GB SAS drives. We have ordered two 600GB SAS drives anyway to try and will benefit from the extra space.
The server itself is a Dell PoweEdge T410 with a Xeon processor and 16GB RAM.
Has anyone encountered something like this before?
Appreciate any advice or suggestions.
Cheers.
Last edited:
