It's the middle of a rather nice day , when I get a call from a client 30 minutes north of me.
She says, on bootup the server gives some "service failed to start" message. What do I do, she asks, we have a really big day tomorrow?
(I tell her my rates just increased by $100 per hour!... j/k)
Tell her to continue to boot and check event log. She says "antivirus has error starting".
Tell her to check for other event log errors and warnings and she finds multiple EventID 9 and 51 errors with a starting date of today.
For all you nice folks out there, EventID 9 maps to SCSI hardware/cabling issue and EventID 51 is generic harddrive problem. I'm assuming it's either a RAID drive or motherboard problem.
Grab some equipment and it's time for a nice drive.
Onsite, I find an XP workstation keeps trumping the Windows 2000 server as the Master browser. Geez...Come on Microsoft! So I fix that problem right quick.
Now to the bigger fish;
Plug a diagnostic USB stick into the server and Whammo... complete and utter lockup . Fine, be that way!
Reboot, change plans and put the USB stick aside.
[Sidenote: Computers are like women, sometimes you pamper them, other times you want to slap 'em around]
Examine the event log hex data output for each error ID and after decoding it, I find controller0, port0, drive0 as bad during writes (Master RAID drive), even the Event Viewer description shows it as \Device\Harddisk0\DR0drive0 (Master RAID drive).
I've been in this business too long and I don't trust the computers diagnosis so I remove both harddrives to sector scan them without breaking the Array. (In case it's a controller error, I brought a replacement).
Low and behold, the SPARE RAID drive has multiple read errors and the MASTER drive is not only readable but NOT kicking out any errors at all.
Make an image of the Master RAID drive, add a replacement 40GB drive as Slave (on separate controller, of course), enter RAID CMOS, break the existing Array, start a new Array and let the hardware make a duplicate. Put the boys back to bed and start her up.
No errors or problems after multiple reboots. Replug the USB stick and all is cozy. Call it a day. (Although I'm still there right now screwing around typing this stuff).
Anyways, long story short -- Am I the only one, or do you ever find error codes, problems or messages that try to lead you astray and DON'T point to the real problem?
Any good stories?
