Server 2003 Hangs After Soft Reboot

[sexconker]

We've got a file server running Server 2003, and whenever we do a restart on it (like last night, for the RPC patch), the thing hangs just before the login screen.

You can't connect to it remotely.

You can't connect to it remotely with /admin.

You can't log in at the console. You just get a blank blue background where the login box should be.

There are no errors or anything interesting in the system log.

The odd thing is all the services (file shares, domain controller, etc) work fine when the machine is in this state.

I don't know if we can issue any remote commands to it (such as logging into another server on the network and trying a remote restart), but I'll remember to try it the next time this happens.

What we end up doing is physically killing the power (5 seconds on the power button), then doing a cold boot, which works perfectly fine.

Any ideas?

Thanks.

[macarong]

Hi,

I got the same problem every morning at work.

The system simply hang when I enter the password to log in.

Do you know what was wrong?

Thanks,

Mcr

[sexconker]

Never solved it.

It hasn't happened the last few times we've restarted (I don't think), though.

I believe one of the last things we did was update the network card drivers, though, that may have been for another server with a different issue...

If your machine is unable to boot properly from a cold boot (power off, wait a few seconds, power on) then it's probably not the same issue.

The issue we had was specifically for a soft restart / warm boot / whatever you want to call it.