Metaframe hangs on startup

[Ayman Altounji]

My system is a Compaq Proliant 1600 300mhz, 384MB RAM, (2) 4GB hard drives, running NT Terminal Server with Metaframe 1.8. SNMP services NOT installed.

After 6 months of flawless operation, my system suddenly refuses to boot from the hard drive, it hangs on the black screen immediately following the ?Press F10 for system utilities? message. It boots fine from an NT formatted floppy disk with NTDETECT.COM, NTLDR and BOOT.INI. I saved the originals and copied these boot files to the hard drive, no luck. I tried repairing the boot sector using NT install disk, no luck. I tried FDISK/MBR, no luck. There are two partitions on the hard drive, one EISA partition 39MB, and one NTFS partition 4055MB. I installed another 4GB drive, mirrored the NTFS partition & tried booting from the shadow disk, still no luck.

If I use the F10 option at startup, the system utilities start just fine. System diagnostics indicate no problem. I took the boot drive out of another NT server & put it in the suspect machine & it booted fine.

I?m running out of ideas, do you folks have any other suggestions?

Any help is appreciated, thanks.

Jack Rose
Systems Administrator

[Ayman Altounji]

Peculiar... Might try running our diagnostics utility on the hard disks. Are you using an array controller on this one?

[Ayman Altounji]

Hello,

We are experiencing the same issue. Have you been able to resolve this issue?

Thanks
Allan Parys
Client Server Integration

[Ayman Altounji]

Must be an epidemic.
We had the same problem yesterday as mentioned above.
If someone was able to resolve this phenomenon, please let us know it.

Thanks OEBV Armin Langer

[Ayman Altounji]

We "resolved" the problem by deleting the EISA partition, creating a FAT partition, formatting it under NT, making it active, and copying the boot files to it. I'm not sure what other problems we may have induced, but it now boots from the hard drive.

Jack Rose Systems Administrator

[Ayman Altounji]

We had similar issues and discovered that when using a KVM switch with an extended mouse cable NTDETECT hangs on the mouse. When we have plugged a mouse in locally it boots everytime. Not a good solution however it has eliminated the time involved on further problem solving.