Server reboot problem...

[Ayman Altounji]

I posted a message in the OLD forum regarding this situation I am encountering. Perhaps a new forum will be the trick.. ;-)

A customer of mine has a Proliant 1600 server with 256MB RAM and a RAID 1 configuration (mirrored drives) using (2) 9.1GB SCSI disks and the built-in Compaq RAID controller. The server had previously ran for over a year with no problems. During that year, it was running on NT SP4. I was called onsite one day due to the first server crash my customer has experienced in that time frame. When I researched the problem, I saw that the SYSTEM partition had less than 150MB space left and that the Extended Partition had over 3GB space. So we purchased Server Magic and resized the partitions appropriately as well as added another 128MB RAM. All ran fine for about a month when, all of a sudden, the server started rebooting on it's own during a tape backup session. (They use Seagate Backup Exec 6.0 for NT SBS) I have been troubleshooting the problem for over a month now. I saw in the OLD forum that Compaq recommended installing SP6a then applying the latest Compaq SSD. So I did that. And it still reboots. So I continued troubleshooting by taking out the new memory upgrade, re-installing the backup software, etc. I still have the reboot problem.

The event message I get is:

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The Compaq System Management Driver has detected that the system encountered an NT bugcheck prior to this boot. The bugcheck data was: STOP: 0x0000000A (0x0000005C, 0x00000002, 0x00000000, 0xF31864C7).
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I can successfully get a backup using the NT built-in Backup solution. However, if I use the Seagate software, it never completes and always reboots. The reboot has occured immediately after it starts the backup as well as in middle and close to the end. There is no specific time in general, just during the backup process some time. I hope someone has a solution or an answer to this one!! It is becoming quite frustrating for me (and my customer)!!! LOL

[Ayman Altounji]

To clarify something here, the 1600 doesn't have a built-in RAID controller... Doesn't have anything to do with this issue, but you need to know that.

Have you tried reinstalling Backup Exec or patching it?

A bugcheck like that is usually software related and if you can get a good memory dump (Control Panel - System - Startup/Shutdown) Microsoft can debug that dump to find the most likely cause of the issue.

[Ayman Altounji]

(I apologize... it is using the built-in Compaq SCSI controller, my error! It is a software RAID built by NT.)

I did re-install Backup Exec, but I did not apply any patches to it. As far as memory dumps..... I do not believe any are occuring. I will give it a second look, but I do not remember seeing any. I am going back to the customer today and will check it out!

[Ayman Altounji]

What was the final solution you gave Trowly??

[Ayman Altounji]

I have exactly the same hardware and config with my client. We are running NT 4 SP6a with Seagate Backup Exec v7.2 (build 1025). Although not as often as yourselves, we have experienced random reboots (about 1 every 3 weeks) which has just started happening recently. The error message we get in the Management Log is exactly the same too. We have had the server for over three years and have never had this problem until now.

At first we susupected it was hardware issue but after reading your post it appears it may well be a software issue with Backup Exec. Another thing which makes me susupect it is Backup Exec is that the crashes have always occured at around about 11pm - during which Backup Exec is running (and nothing else).

I am planning to run the Compaq Diagnostics soon to rule out the possibility of a hardware issue. I will also check Veritas to see if this is a known problem with Backup Exec.

Will report back soon.