Motherboard Problem?

I've got a real problem with my company's main server. Please bear with me.

This AM, the server was found dead in the water. When we tried to restart it, we received the message "HAL.DLL is missing or corrupt". No problem, thought I, as I popped in the Windows 2K server CD, and went to the recovery console. Ran "chkdsk /r". Started promisingly, but hit 75%, backedup to 50% and then progressed agonizingly slowly. Reached 72% and backed to 52%. But started to run more quickly. Finally completed and said "unrecoverable errors". BTW, this process took 3 hours. I was concerned about stopping... feeling that I might leave something in mid-fix. Convinced that the server had crashed overnight and that I had some disk damage, I tried the "easy way" and (using another computer) did a drive image of the disk to a brand new drive. I figured there might be some problems, but that the recovery console could take care of them.

Put the new disk in the box. Good new, system started .... almost. Got through logon when BSOD. Tried to bring it up in Safe Mode. This worked. System said that it had installed new hardware and rebooted. BSOD. Ran Automatic Recovery from the CD. All is well. New BSOD message. 5 hours have passed.

Out of desperation, put the original damaged disk back in the box. System booted and ran OK. Made backup of company database and let the troops try to work with the system ... at least we can do some work. This went fine, there wer no problems during the remainder of the day. BUT, I noticed that drive E was "missing". I brought up the disk manager console and found the disk was "offline". Tried to re-activate the drive and succeeded ... but drive F disappeared. This box has 4 disk controllers for the 4 drives and 1 CD.

At 5 PM, I kicked everyone off, backed up the database, shut the system down. Replaced the damaged old drive with the BSOD new one. I also chedked on the "missing drive" by placing it as the master drive in the secondary controller of the XP box. Drive was fine. Ran chkdsk. Drive is fine. Put it back into the win2k server and put the BSOD generating new drive. Botted, all is well. No BSOD. But, also No D or E drives.

While this is going on, I put the "damaged OS drive" into the XP box as a secondary device (drive d). Ran chkdsk /r. No problems.

I had thought that I had a simple disk crash with some damage to the media. Now, I don't know what to think. I've ruled out bad disk controllers, because the disappearing disks are on different controllers. My current candidates are: power supply(s), motherboard, or some kind of virus/trojan/malware.

Anyone have a similar experience, or any ideas as to how to check this out?

Thanks for any suggestions.

I wonder if this is a dynamic disk problem more info here I can't help much beyond that, other than I got caught out a couple of years ago and vowed not to use them again!

So since I can see no mention of the word 'dynamic disk' anywhere in the fairly 'full description' of the problem, I'm wondering why we started with that as 'a possible' - especially when for either dynamic or not, "HAL.DLL is missing or corrupt" almost always means that some boot order problem or issue is at the root of matters one way or another ..

Here I'd do either a fresh install & restore my backup or try an inplace re-install, ASR is only 1/2 way to that - here I think we need to force fresh hardware detect & setup as I'm guessing there was something 'not quite so' in the original setup or damaged/erroneous data stored in nvram to confuse matters - also resetting bios or at least clearing NVRAM (look in bios) would be 'advisable' also (which is what I think 'is up' - corrupted NVRAM - happens frequently & especially with dirty shutdowns or when kit gets swapped a lot).

NTFS is all fine & dandy until it goes wrong on your boot partition, then you might as well start again as try & fix it ;)

This bit however confuses the hell out of me ..

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..This box has 4 disk controllers for the 4 drives and 1 CD.

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Nearly all motherboards have just one disk controller, with two channels (IDE) which can support a maximum of four drives (two per channel/wire), if we have SATA present then you still have the same one controller for the IDE connections which are present, but the sata drives are actually controlled by the chipset & dependent on that, that may be an additional controller or part of memory handling (this gets very complicated very quickly as to just whats responsible 'how' so since I don't know we have SATA & on what motherboard I shan't digress any more). The other way to have more than four devices is to add an additional IDE controller say via a pci add in card - clearing all that up may yield a 'better' answer..

The dynamic disk business could have something to do with this. I don't have many computers with more than one drive. Some of these disks are labelled as dynamic. But, I don't know if that is the way I set them up or if windows did something to me. I'm pretty sure that the disk attached to the IDE controller that is missing was a basic disk. Now it is labelled as dynamic .... AND ... the cdrom on the same cable seems to be ok.

Can I really do a re-install on win2k server without losing all of the installation?

This is BAD.. I was supposed to be on vacation today. But, I'm afraid I can't go until this problem is resolved.

Thanks for the suggestions.

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Can I really do a re-install on win2k server without losing all of the installation?

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'Mostly' (requires re-install of service packs & then you may run into 'order of patches' issues with subsequently installed programs like office for instance - but broadly 'in theory' yes ;)) - How to Perform an In-Place Upgrade of Windows 2000 - Microsoft Knowledge Base Article - 292175

Dynamic disks have their uses, but if you can't think of any for you (they can be a good idea at the right time & in the right setup, but almost never ever ever for boot disks), then stick with 'normal' ones ;) - if your 'hal' is 'screwed' then this as a 'resultant symptom' doesn't surprise me ..

Still not clear though about this 5 devices where only four can live business & it may have a bearing ..are you on about physical drives or drive letters ?

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Originally Posted by confus-ed

'Mostly' (requires re-install of service packs & then you may run into 'order of patches' issues with subsequently installed programs like office for instance - but broadly 'in theory' yes ;)) - How to Perform an In-Place Upgrade of Windows 2000 - Microsoft Knowledge Base Article - 292175

Dynamic disks have their uses, but if you can't think of any for you (they can be a good idea at the right time & in the right setup, but almost never ever ever for boot disks), then stick with 'normal' ones ;) - if your 'hal' is 'screwed' then this as a 'resultant symptom' doesn't surprise me ..

Still not clear though about this 5 devices where only four can live business & it may have a bearing ..are you on about physical drives or drive letters ?

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There are 4 separate controllers. Two IDE and 2 Raid. Each controller can support two physical devices via a ribbon cable. Drive 0 (C:) is the only device on IDE1. IDE2 has one hard disk and one cdrom. Each of the two raid controllers has one hard disk.

It turns out that it was the dynamic disk problem. Finally got MS tech support expert who know exactly what the problem was and how to fix it. He reset the disks from dyamic to basic by changing one byte in the header of each of the three disks. Turns out the disks had been basic and somehow got changed to dynamic. I didn't do it, but it must have happened during all of my flailing trying to get the system to work correctly.

Thanks to all, and expecially NooNoo, who is apparently psychic.

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Originally Posted by OldBob

It turns out that it was the dynamic disk problem...
Thanks to all, and expecially NooNoo, who is apparently psychic.

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She is :thumbs: annoyingly so at times ! ;)

As a btw - did you try an inplace re-install or not - I'm sat here wondering whether it'd have fixed it 'regardless' ?

If you - oldbob (when you come back from your hols !) - can give us the low down on what fixed it 'exactly' then that'd be appreciated, someone can then Google it later, should they have this problem or similar - if 'we' don't manage a solution, its always nice when folks tell us how ! :)

So your 'expert who know exactly what the problem was' must have known this :-

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..the partition system-id byte from type 0x42 (dynamic) to a basic partition system-id byte based on the file system chosen, usually 0x06 for FAT, 0x0B for FAT32 or 0x07 for NTFS...

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This Kb may be useful to anyone later too System or Boot Disk Listed as Dynamic Unreadable in Disk Management - Microsoft Knowledge Base Article - 236086 it tells you about the Dskprobe ulitility which can be found on the Windows 2000 CD-ROM in the Support\Tools folder.

I can feel the love ed :D

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Originally Posted by confus-ed

She is :thumbs: annoyingly so at times ! ;)

As a btw - did you try an inplace re-install or not - I'm sat here wondering whether it'd have fixed it 'regardless' ?

If you - oldbob (when you come back from your hols !) - can give us the low down on what fixed it 'exactly' then that'd be appreciated, someone can then Google it later, should they have this problem or similar - if 'we' don't manage a solution, its always nice when folks tell us how ! :)

So your 'expert who know exactly what the problem was' must have known this :-


This Kb may be useful to anyone later too System or Boot Disk Listed as Dynamic Unreadable in Disk Management - Microsoft Knowledge Base Article - 236086 it tells you about the Dskprobe ulitility which can be found on the Windows 2000 CD-ROM in the Support\Tools folder.

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No, I didn't do an in-place reinstall. And the KB article is right on the money. We changed the system ID byte from 42 to 07 using diskprobe. My boss is now afraid of the computer. I will have a delayed vacation, and a new server in a week or two. I still don't have any idea as to what caused the HAL.DLL problem in the first place, this is what ultimately led to the missing disks. The system is now running fine, all of the disks check with chkdsk.

Am going to the office to check on the system in a couple of hours. Currently praying that the damn think holds up for a couple of weeks, until a replacement arrives.

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Originally Posted by NooNoo

I can feel the love ed :D

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Aww you can ! - but them 'physic moments' do my head in, you make seemingly random, vaguely connected comments, & always {or almost} get it right ! Grrrrr ! :D - female intuition at work I guess which is a complete mystery to me ! ..;)

So I shall have to content myself with spotting the answer after ..

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Currently praying that the damn think holds up for a couple of weeks, until a replacement arrives.

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Well I doubt that the disk itself is at fault, whatever 'messed' with the disk via s/w is what you want to track down, or keep an eye out for anyone who might be changing things (as you say maybe you did it & what was at fault was some other disk error, which your 'eventual' completion of chkdsk might have fixed), as from inside windows the only thing I can think of that's meant to be able to change a volume from normal/basic to dynamic is disk manager console itself.