For some unknown reason I discovered that one of my servers was not responding so I thought I would restart it and while I was waiting for it to come back online to my horror it blue screened just after the Windows 2000 Server splash screen was shown.
The dreaded BSOD:
With this error Microsoft have some information here.
I thought I would restart it and hopefully this time it would boot up but no it appeared again.
According to Microsoft it could be hardware related, which most BSODs are, so I disconnected anything that was not needed on bootup and if this did work I would try to narrow the faulty hardware down by replacing them one by one. So I disconnected my SCSI tape drives, removed the internal SCSI cards, the network cards and also left just one stick of RAM in. But it was still blue screening, then I remembered that the RAID controller was complaining of a low battery a few weeks ago so I replaced the battery pack and it was still blue screening. Now I was getting frustrated after spending hours dismantling and then putting everything back together.
Now I thought I would try running chksk on the hard drives to see if there was a corrupt sector causing this.
To do this I downloaded a Windows 2000 Server boot disk from here. I started the server backup with the disk and while it was accessing the disk it came up with a message saying it could not find a particular file, the file, which was stated on the BSOD; ntoskrnl.exe.
Now with a glimmer of hope I took the following steps:
- I downloaded and copied my RAID drivers which is a PERC 3D/i card so I copied the drivers to a floppy disk and booted the server using a Windows 2000 Server install CD.
- When the install program is loading it asks if you want to load additional drivers by pressing F6; so I pressed F6.
- After it has copied the Server 2000 files it will ask for a floppy with the RAID drivers on, insert the disk and press Enter.
- Select R for the recovery console and I selected the option for automated repair, this is the best option if you don't know which files to look for because it will search and look for any corrupt files and replace them.
- Let the Server do its repair and it will restart and with any luck it should load up.