Where do i begin ...to tell the story of how lonley life can be...especially at 3.00am in the morning when everyone else is snugged up in bed and muggins here is still at work for the 5th night in a row trying to get some incling of why Mr. Gates hates me so much! Well it all started last week when w2k suddenly crashed on a program launch...dumped some information to disk...and shutdown of its own accord... did it recover and bristle back to life? no siree. Unfortunately my introduction to w2k was but a week old i.e. i knew absolutely nothing about it. The Server began at a snails pace...took over 1.5hrs to boot...well i never waited longer than 0.5 - 1.0 hr to find out the exact time as the drawing office was busy and now the drafties had no files to work on. Windows 2k was installed as an upgrade to the old NT4.0 PDC...the server is a Compaq Proliant 3000...runs Exchange 2000...has a mirrored system disk(SCSI) and 3no. SCSI Data disks Raid 5 config...the server has always been reliable under NT4.0 but its one drawback is it only has 256MB RAM.. I went through all the repair proceedures but none really worked...not even restoring the last known good config. The following night i booted to safe mode and began setting the services to manual and kept rebooting until i got a satisfactory boot to normal mode. I left that night at about 3.30am and left the machine to normal boot with all the services set to manual.....i did attempt to reapply all the Compaq management resources before this.. by the morning the logon screen was up but when the admin password was entered it became obvious that I'd be better off with a cup of tea and toast with my feet up! I then restarted( powercycle) and indesperation tried the restore last known config again and Ureka it worked. When i went to the services manager...all the services were set to manual...as i had left them the night before... so i started to start all the services that i thought were necessary for Exchange and File access functionality and sure enough mail was back and the Drafties could logon again. Then my first big mistake..i uninstalled Arcserve...i never thought i'd say that!!!..this package has been bagged more than any other for mucking things up...i had no backup now for 3 nights so i was getting anxious...the Proliant machine is one of two DCs(same domain) but has the 4mm DDS4 DAT drive attached...i needed to backup but decided to use the Windows backup instead. For the life of me the w2k backup would not run...did not recognise the media as blank(it was) I treid to install the latest driver for the HP surestore DAT... another mistake as i was later to learn...which i downloaded from the site...Windows did not like this at all and when i pointed to the new driver it died...not crashed...i had to kill the process in the end. From this point all attempts to unload the DAT device or reinstall the driver have simply died...Also, I've tried to start other services but they have timed out...Microsoft will tell you that this does not mean that they don't work just that the service does not respond in a timely fashion... I went back to reinstalling Arcserve but now i got an installer error...(Also,I tried to reinstall SP2 but this also died i.e. nothing wants to install anymore.) Computer Associates assurred that this was a windows installer error and i should go and download myself a new one...which i did..but it seems you cannot replace the MSI.DLL, MSIEXEC.EXE & MSIHND.DLL files as they are SPA protected....i tried anyway using Msciexe /unregister but of course and got rid of two of the above installer files but not MSI.DLL as one would expect...My server thankfully retains its email and file sharing capabilities but my backup is doomed. I'm sure i need to reregister the msiexec.exe file as noww when i log on the desktop will no longer appear. I will travel to buy beer if nyone can help...maybe i'll become a novelist and bounce this IT Career. Thanks for listening.
Bumble
Bumble
