# Dell Poweredge SC420 Rebooting Continually



## cerksees (Jun 26, 2010)

I was elected to solve a serious issue for our little company, but I am having serious problems figuring it out.

Our Dell Poweredge SC420 (running Windows SBS 2003) starting rebooting continually. This was odd as we have a 2 drive RAID 1 built in and I thought the second drive would take over should the first one fail. (It may well have....I would not be surprised if the warnings were ignored until both drives failed.)

Nonetheless, here I am. I have replaced the main hard drive and disconnected the second drive. I have restored the primary drive's partitions from Acronis 9.1 build 3.718 server edition. The last backup we had was from June 9, 2010. So, I restored from it, but the new drive and image just kept doing the same thing. It shows the Dell screen, then the Windows 2003 Server screen, then 3 little squares in the progress bar and it reboots.

Thinking the June 9, 2010 image may be bad, I restored from the June 1, 2010 image and tried again. Same issues. Dell....Windows 2003....3 squares....reboot.....

So, I went back to the May 1, 2010 image and restored from there. Same issue. I'm thinking that ALL of the images couldn't be bad. The images themselves do not show any signs of being bad (no red X's or anything).

There is no ASR disk as the original builder did not create one and we didn't know enough about running a server to make one before this disaster popped up it's nasty little head.

I tried putting in Disk 1 from the Dell set and rebooting, but it just installs a second copy of Windows Server automatically. I did not see a time where I could go into the Recovery Console to muck around with Fixmbr or Fixboot. (I tried this 3 times, restoring from Acronis after each attempt - since the attempts all resulted in the attempted install of a new instance of Windows Server 2003.)

I even ran Spinrite on the old drive but did not see any errors (on level 2 recovery). I guess I could try and run a level 4 maintenance - but that would take many, many hours and may not pay off either since level 2 recovery did not find any errors.

What could be the issue? How can I try Fixboot, or Fixmbr if I cannot launch the Recovery Console? Is there another possible fix that I should try?

We are SOL until I find a way to repair the server. Any suggestions that you could give would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks!


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## cerksees (Jun 26, 2010)

UPDATE!!!! Just fooling around with the BIOS settings, I changed the RAID from Autodetect to ON and she booted up. There are still issues. After "Applying computer settings..." (which can take 2+ minutes) I get "At least one service or driver failed during system startup. Use Event Viewer to examine the event log for details." 

And, the newly imaged drive REQUIRES RAID 1 to be ON. Is there a way to change the drive to just be a regular SATA drive outside of a RAID array?


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## cerksees (Jun 26, 2010)

The answer to this is "no". Once the drive was removed from the array and the BIOS had the RAID array disabled, the drive would go back to the continual rebooting thing.


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