My server keeps dying

[dezt]

I walked into work today and realised that my DC has rebooted itself. I thought it was because of service pack 1 not being installed before so that has since been installed, but it still reboots. Has anyone had any problems like this before? It only reboots about once a month, but that is too often.

 

I'm thinking of buying a new server anyway, and thought if i use the new server as the DC and reconfigure the old DC as a member server and just use it for file storage then things would run better. Will it be hard to transfer the roles to a new server, or should i be looking at sorting out the problem on the existing DC and using the new server for storage?

 

this is the main error that was coming up in my event log.....

 

An I/O operation initiated by the Registry failed unrecoverably. The Registry could not read in, or write out, or flush, one of the files that contain the system's image of the Registry.

 

For more information, see Help and Support Center at http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/events.asp.

 

I have no idea what that means, time to google it.

[djm968]

This error can be caused by a failing drive in a RAID array. I would check the consistency and integrity of the array by performing extensive hardware diagnostics.

 

I would then aim to rebuild the existing server and commission it as a second DC something like, this which is generally known as the “swing method”

 

1) Build the new server

2) Promote the new server to a DC

3) Transfer the FSMO rolls to the new server

4) Make the new server a GC

5) Configure DNS and allow the forward and reverse lookup zones to replicate

6) Transfer DHCP to the new server

7) Transfer any data to the new DC

8) Demote the old DC

9) Run hardware diagnostics

10) Rebuild old server

11) Promote old server to a DC

12) Configure DNS and allow the forward and reverse lookup zones to replicate

 

The above is just a brief outline and I may have missed some steps but it gives a general idea.

 

It is not difficult to transfer FSMO rolls to another DC the article below provides details

 

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/255504/

[nsherin]

I would also run Memtest to carry out a complete memory checkup. When I first joined the school, our SIMS .net server had been installed on a bog standard desktop machine with 512MB of RAM. For months it suffered from random reboots and once a proper server arrived, I moved the SIMS install over to the new box.

 

Out of curiosity (too much time on my hands perhaps), I ran memtest on the temporary box after we'd decommissioned it and sure enough, it did have duff memory, which was IMHO causing the random reboots.