Black screen and white cursor booting a 2008 server related to VSS snapshots?

[cabarrus]

I have a 2008 64 bit virtual server in ESXi 4.1 that runs Exchange 2007. If I reboot the server, prior to getting to the ctrl-alt-del logon screen I see a black screen with a white cursor for atleast a couple of hours. I haven't been able to get past this screen unless I have the virtual nics disabled that are used for iscsi prior to rebooting it. I keep them disabled then I login to server and enable them. I saw a post on the bottom of an article - Small Business Server 2008 - Extremely slow/long boot, hanging on black screen with mouse cursor which I quoted below. I have ran the DevNodeClean tool and it discovered 8379 phantom devices. My question is whether the VSS snapshots creating registry keys and not deleting them could be related to my issue and whether using the command DevNodeClean is safe to use in the removal with my Nimble CS220. thanks

Small Business Server 2008 - Extremely slow/long boot, hanging on black screen with mouse cursor (Im not sure what the long url is below but it keeps on getting auto-generated)

https://login.live.com/login.srf?wa=wsignin1.0&wtrealm=social.technet.microsoft.com&wreply=https%3a%2f%2fwww.google.com%2furl%3fsa%3dt%26rct%3dj%26esrc%3ds%26frm%3d1%26source%3dweb%26cd%3d2%26cad%3drja%26ved%3d0CDIQFjAB%26url%3dhttp%253a%252f%252fsocial.technet.microsoft.com%252fForums%252fen-US%252fsmallbusinessserver%252fthread%252f39a04479-2fd9-40bd-bde0-9ca7b90a1a5c%252f%26ei%3dv1O4Ubj9HYbu8QS...

I was having a similar issue on my SBS 2008 server. Boot up to a black screen for about 1 hour. Logging on to the system would make it rail 1 CPU and sever all client access for another hour, or, it would BSOD: DRIVER_POWER_STATE_FAILURE

My problem was caused by enabling hourly VSS quiesced snapshots on iSCSI attached storage: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/934234 and http://support.microsoft.com/kb/982210 Once the device count exceeds 10,000, your system will take extremely long to boot.

The link below is the compiled code referred to in the first link above with some improvements as well: http://bytesolutions.com/Support/Knowledgebase/KB_Viewer/ArticleId/35/DevNodeClean-Download-remove-phantom-storage-device-nodes.aspx

Running the DevNodeClean tool with the -l option found 10,698 phantom devices on my system. It took over 2 hours to remove them all, but there was no impact to the users of the system while it was running.

I also implemented the hosts file modifications suggested by LogicSolutions. I recommend those changes as well. My system can get to the Ctrl-Alt-Delete screen much faster now.

[cabarrus · Accepted solution]

In the file named: Windows_Toolkit_1.4.0_Release_Notes_PN990-0002-001.pdf on page 5 (bug 18053) it is devoted to the Phantom Registry Device Removal which is what i was referencing.

It lists these keys which we can make modify to have these keys removed in an automated fashion:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Nimble Storage\CleanPhantomDevices

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Nimble Storage\CleanPhantomDevicesInterval

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Nimble Storage\CleanPhantomDevicesThreshold