silkshadow

I just want to thank everyone for their help by posting back the culprit of my boot loop, maybe helping someone else. I tried everything suggested but just couldn't get it to work. So this past weekend I spent 3 days rebuilding this server but I discovered the problem on the very first day. All my drivers went in fine and I ran Windows update. I installed everything there and rebooted only to get the same boot loop again. So it was something Windows update installed! I uninstalled each item and found the problem. It was .net framework 3.0! Man, sometimes I really hate Microsoft. I could've avoided alot of wasted time, if I had just experimented by doing a clean install test. However, I already demoted this box from AD so I had to finish the rebuild. Stupid me. Anyway, the other box doesn't have .net 3.0 installed, so if I did a careful comparison (which I swore I did at least half a dozen times) I should've also have seen it. Very frustrating, so I hope I can save someone else this aggravation. Anyway, thanks again everyone for all your help!!!

Awesome! Thanks alot, I will give those a try over the next couple of days and post back.

Ok, tried the /sos switch and I was really hoping that the /sos would tell me what I needed to know, but it didn't . It shows everything till acpitabl.dat and then it goes into a grey screen which lists my OS, processor, ram and is the /sos equivalent of the normal boot screen. Then boot loops like always. That /sos mode is totally useless, why MS why? Why have a mode that lists drivers loading and not show all the drivers till it actually boots?! The logic sometimes astounds me, it sometimes feels like the Windows devs just sit around and figure out how to make a user more frustrated . So the last three items it shows, before the grey screen is crcdisk.sys, drvmain.sdb and acpitabl.dat. Then, according to a boot log I made running the ACPI Uniprocessor driver, all the 3rd party drivers start to load. I think you guys are definitely right, there is a driver that doesn't like ACPI Multiprocessor, however how to figure out which one just seems impossible if there is no way to log it? I am beginning to loose hope and am going to be forced to spend a couple of my weekends reinstalling and, worse, configuring, everything on this box. Arg . Any more ideas would be feverently appreciated! Thanks for all the help!

That sounds promising and I do have a camcorder . Thanks alot! I will give it a go tomorrow (its 3AM here) and post back. I appreciate the help!! Heh, that would explain why my memory of that is very foggy .

No I have not tried that, will do so and post back. I wasn't even aware of that option :blush: That makes alot of sense! Any idea how I could discover what driver it is? Or what driver could not be compatible? I had it stripped down to just video card (Nvidia 6600), motherboard (nforce 4 ultra) and MS drivers. All the newest drivers as of 4 months ago. I can get you version numbers of drivers, if that would help, but I did try and update them all. When I updated them all, I ran into a problem with the video card and had to uninstall the pervious version manually to get the new one in, but after I did that, it still boot looped like previously. Incidentally, I did have an AMD processor driver installed which I traced back to a "cool and quiet" AMD driver, that I had no idea was a processor driver. I thought it was a motherboard driver enabling the cool and quiet feature. I checked the other box and it also had the cool and quiet driver installed. I uninstalled it (from both) and installed the AMD x2 64 driver. It did increase performance of the working box but didn't change the boot loop of the ailing one. Edit: If you mean system -> advanced -> Startup and recovery, etc -> "automatically restart", then I just tried unticking that and chaining to ACPI multiprocessor, but it still boot looped, the same as before. I left it alone and it looped 4 times, I just tried boot logging mode and am booting into safe mode to see if it was able to write any log. Edit 2: Nope, only the safe mode boot log, again . I seem to remember there was a line-by-line way to boot Windows (where it asked Y/N for every driver being loaded) but its not an option on my F8 screen. Man, if I could just find out what is being loaded when the boot loop occured, it feels like I would be able to fix this. Thanks!

Thank you for your reply! I am not sure. I can't figure out how to tell because, when I choose "boot logging" mode, it doesn't write anything to the boot log. I think its rebooting itself too fast. If I delete the boot log and enable boot logging mode, wait for it to reboot itself a couple of times, and then enter safe mode to read the log, it only has a log of the safe mode boot. I have even tried a delete of the log file, boot log enabled, and a BartPE disk to access the log file and its blank. So I just let the box alone for a bit over an hour to see if it righted itself, but it just boot looped the whole time. I also thought it might be something to do with a driver, so I tried uninstalling all non-essential devices in safe mode, deleted non essential driver files in %windir%/system32/drivers, powering down and physically removing those devices but it still boot looped. I would like to try fresh ACPI multiprocessor PC drivers, but I have no idea where to get them and, its a long shot, as the ones I currently have are still MS signed so I think its doubtful anything is wrong with them. Right now, using the ACPI uniprocessor PC config/driver instead of multiprocessor is the only thing that avoids a boot loop, which is very strange, I think. Moving from one ACPI to another should not have any issues. Is there another way to find out what is going on right before the boot loop? I have several acronis images I can restore from so I am willing to try anything at all. Thanks!

I have two machines with similar specs, both running Win2k3 32-bit. The only difference is that one had an AMD64 3500+ and the other had a 3200+. I recently upgraded the CPUs on both to AMD64 x2 3800+ (dual cores). On one machine, the upgrade went fine. Task manager sees both cores and all is working fine. On the other machine, the proessor upgrade caused a boot loop. What I mean is that the Windows 2003 boot screen comes up and the scanner goes from left to right about 3-4 times, then the machine reboots. I left it for an hour and it just kept rebooting. In troubleshooting, it does the reboot too fast to to write a boot log. However, I was able to isolate the problem. I can enter safe mode with no issues at all. In safe mode, if I change the Computer type from ACPI Multiprocessor PC to ACPI uniprocessor PC then it boots fine. The drivers for the processors are loaded correctly and show no trouble in device manager and the machine works fine. However, the OS only sees and uses 1 core. If I change it back to ACPI multiprocessor (which is an avalible driver), then it goes into boot loop again. I have tested each compnent in other machines (as well as run memtest, CPUz, Prime95, etc) and all hardware is fine. I have also tried reinstalling the OS, as a test, and it worked fine. However, I do not want to do that. These machines are currently setup correctly. Both are AD and I do alot of testing on them. Reinstalling would be a real pain and require alot of man hours. Does anyone have any ideas I can try to somehow get my current Win2k3 install to do the ACPI change? I would appreciate any help or ideas. From everything I have read, this should not be an issue. Thank you!

Not really. I mean yeah you can install apps to a network share but they wil run slow. VS you can run the server as an app server. I am pretty sure VS 2003 has this feature built into it.

Humm, easy answer is to lock down the kiosks so that new programs can't be installed. Do your users have to install things? Because you can have one set image with all the programs installed and roll 'em out to however many boxes you want. This can be automated. To lock down the kiosks, there are a bunch of programs, but I have never had a need for that so don't lnow. Try searching "internet cafe software" on google. Or you can just have daily wipes/re image roll outs at the end of every day. This, again, is easy to automate.

I've been pulling my hair out. I can't get my server 2003 box to go into suspend automatically. When I hit the suspend button it suspends fine and recovers great. After fighting with it for an hour, I have set suspend to be 1 minute in power management as well as setting it to 1 minute in my bios. For good measure, I disconnected the keyboard and mouse as well as yanked the RJ-45. 1 hour later, still no suspend. What I want to ask is can server 2003 suspend itself automatically? If it can, I know there is some service or setting that is preventing it from doing so. I have poured over the group policy console and the registry in HKLM/software/microsoft/windows/current version. I can't find anything. Can anybody help? Thanks!

Thanks! Guess its time to find a new video card.

Ah ha! No it is not. Thanks for that tip. So any video cards not in that catalog http://www.microsoft.com/windows/catalog/s...=1&btnSearch=Go will not work with their native drivers?

Thanks! I tried that as well as earlier version drivers. Stil no luck. Its driving me a bit batty. I just completed yet another rebuild of the OS/software and I still had the exact same problem. *sigh* I'm about to give up on this card and buy a new one. Though I am over my tech budget as it is. Can I ask what version of directX you are running? I've got 9 off an old game and then have 9c but both have the same problem. |(

Ok, I'm trying to make my windows 2003 server do double duty as a HTPC. I just went though the great windows 2003 as a workstation how-to. That things is fantastic. One of the things it says is that if I do enable the 3D stuff in directx, I can install the drivers for the manufacturer. I am having a bit of trouble with this. I installed the current drivers and it installed fine. However, when I rebooted, I only have two modes avalible: 640x48, 16-colors, default refresh 800x600, 16-colors, default refresh I uninstalled and reinstalled, same thing. Also, the nvidia control panel in advanced is no where to be found. The default Microsoft do drivers work however, I need TV-out to work and there seems to be no way to switch displays with the Microsoft driver. Is there any way to get these drivers working? Is this a common problem, or is it something with my config? I know Nvidia itself says to use the Microsoft drivers but, for my purposes, the MS driver just dosen't do the job. Thanks for any guidance! AMD Athlon XP 2000+ ECS K7vta3 512mb 333 sdram geforce 3 64mb Windows server 2003 DirectX 9.0c

Hi, just found this site due to its great windows 2003 as a workstation how-to. Thats a great piece of work! Having a bit of an issue with nvidia's drivers am going to search now and see if I can find a solution.