Windows Server 2003 Down.....

[ehime]

Let me explain were I'm at and what we've done, and let me be the firs to say I'm not a

server guy, but I'm the most tech literate person here so being pushed into this (*&$

problem.

We had our server cut communications with the rest of our client computers yesterday

morning when I got in, I had everyone restart their computers and then restarted the

server, neither worked. I plugged a monitor into our server (no monitor on it usually)

and it did NOT receive a signal. I cleaned connectors and etc for about 25min, tried

swapping RAM, and other little things. Well our server has had a problem with onboot

before were it will not post data, not send signal, and the lights will flash on front. No

beeps btw. I can usually get it working by hijacking the boot process with a floppy disk

(BIOS set to A:\ on boot 1st). I could get it to power on, but no signal anymore from

the monitor.

I had been building (in the background) a new server computer to take the place of this

one that was on it's last leg, and was forced into using it this time, it was unformated,

and pretty much how I built it. I had to scrap the idea of going MS2008 since I did not

have time to load and configure it in the background.

I took the HDD out of the old computer, ran a Repair session on it (Repair option #2 for

those who know what I'm talking about, option one would not let us use our Admin PWD,

and I got sick of typing the PWD 3 times, just to restart). This would have been fine but

from the looks of it my company does NOT hold an OEM CD. This is bad but there isn't

anything I can do. During repair I did the Shift + F10 trick to verify that there still was

something left on the HDD (you never know). Since there is no OEM CD I was missing

Windows 2003 Server CD 2/2, and had to cancel out of three screens to get it to load.

Screen one asked for install.exe, screen two IEXPLORE.exe, screen three did not post

what it required?

After that it booted fine, I cleared my logs and rebooted to get fresh error logs. 2003 on

boot tell me that it was an incomplete installation and that things are missing, please refer

to event viewer (cleaned and waiting to see what's missing). It looks like IEXPLORE was

installed incorrectly (duh) and that there is a problem with my DNS not wanting to be static

anymore, to reconfigure as Dynamic. I went into services, shut off and turned on DNS.

And here I am. All the computers we have running right now do not connect to the server

but directly to our router.

Please help and tell me what to do, I have absolutely no idea, I am not a server guy. I did

the best I could to rescue our server (which I think I did), now I have no idea what to do

to get everything working.

[AO3]

What are you using the server for? File, printing, mail, etc...?

Was it set as a domain or workgroup?

Raid?

Edited March 20, 2009 by AO3

[ehime]

What are you using the server for? File, printing, mail, etc...?

Was it set as a domain or workgroup?

Raid?

Printing pretty much, we use it as our DNS gateway to the router I believe

also but not positive. I think that the only thing it really does besides keep

some people on the internet is allow them to share Quickbooks via server.

It would be nice to use this as a file server. We have limited capabilities, or

we did on sharing public folders at one point but that was fairly limited.

Edited March 20, 2009 by ehime

[Tripredacus]

I have also had problems after skipping the prompt to insert CD 2. I think it is fine to skip is via RTM, but not if you are installing updates, which I do. So as a rule, we now never skip the CD 2 prompt.

You definately need that second disc, I am going to recommend.