30 Minute Load Time (If Loads At All) After Reboot

[ansomvoodoo]

Hi and thanks in advance for the patience and help. I am a first time computer maintenance worker in a physics research lab at a university and I'm starting to find myself in a little bit over my head (but I'm trying to learn as quickly as I can). I have a fair amount of knowledge of pc software/hardware and a decent amount of networking knowledge but i have never really worked with servers or raid arrays before. So, please bare with me and I'm sorry if my questions and/or abilities to answer your questions are weak.

Problem:

Windows will not load unless only the topmost and bottommost drives of our raid array are turned on. Even when the middle two drives are turned off, windows takes about 30 minutes to load. If we try and start with all four raid drives on windows will just get stuck on the loading screen and will never load fully.

I know that is ambiguous and probably not descriptive enough but I'm basing this off of what people in the lab have told me happens, because I haven't actually been around yet to witness the server reboot. Also, I can not really do to many reboot tests to determine more details because the server needs to be on in order for people to experiment.

Please, if you can, provide me with a range of possible problem explanations that i can than try and test out fixes for sometime really late at night when no one is experimenting (needing the server).

Thanks so much!

 

[mmthomas]

A little more detail would be helpful.

It sounds like you have four hard drives total in your raid array. Is that correct?
Are these drives internal to the server or in some sort of external enclosure?
When you say that you "turn off" the middle two drives, do you mean that you are removing them from the server's drive slots?
When you say "raid array," what do you mean? Do you mean that you have two hard drives that are each mirrored to another hard drive? Or perhaps a set of two striped disks that are mirrored to two more? Or some other raid configuration.
When you boot up with the two middle drives turned off, do you have missing drives? (i.e. The C drive is present, but now the D drive is not there.)

 

[ansomvoodoo]

A little more detail would be helpful.

It sounds like you have four hard drives total in your raid array. Is that correct?
Are these drives internal to the server or in some sort of external enclosure?
When you say that you "turn off" the middle two drives, do you mean that you are removing them from the server's drive slots?
When you say "raid array," what do you mean? Do you mean that you have two hard drives that are each mirrored to another hard drive? Or perhaps a set of two striped disks that are mirrored to two more? Or some other raid configuration.
When you boot up with the two middle drives turned off, do you have missing drives? (i.e. The C drive is present, but now the D drive is not there.)

There are 2 main drives and they each have a mirror (so 4 drives total).
All the drives are in an external enclosure.

Since I haven't actually had personal experience with the reboot attempt process, I'm guessing that what my colleague meant was that she was pressing the power buttons (turning off) on the center two drives (which I'm also guessing are the mirrors, but I'm not completely sure since they're not labeled on the enclosure).

Also, she did not say if there were missing drives when she rebooted with only 2 of the drives turned on... and now the server is running and all 4 drives are on and functioning so I'm not sure what went on while i was absent the past few days. Although the server is currently functioning with all 4 drives, I still need to figure out how to fix this problem for the next reboot.

Thanks!

 

[mmthomas]

Well, here are some things to look at or try which, even if they don't fix the problem, will hopefully get some more information.

1) Check your event logs for any warnings or errors that occur when the system starts up.
2) Your RAID controller may have software in the Start menu that allows you to check the status of drives in the array. Check this for errors.
3) Try to start the server in safe mode with all the drives on. If it starts in safe mode, then there is a problem with a device, driver or service.
4) Run msconfig (from Start > Run). You can use this to try to narrow down the issue if the safe mode start worked, or for further troubleshooting if the safe mode start didn't work. You can use the options on the General tab to do a diagnostic setup and then restart, or a selective startup to turn off things like startup items. You can use the other tabs for more granular control of what to turn off.
5) See if the mirrors are actually working. Have a full backup before doing this. The easiest way to do this is probably to mount the mirror drive as a slave in another machine and check the date of the data. You don't want to swap the mirrors with the main drives because if they are out of date, but then the mirror works when you start up, you'll overwrite your good disks. Skip this step if you're not comfortable with it.

Doing the above may involve several restarts, which may take some time if it's taking a half hour to start up. Keep an eye on what drives are available before and after restarts. Ideally, have a full backup of the machine before you start messing with it.

Possibilities off the top of my head:
1) The RAID card (if you have one) isn't working correctly. In this case, you are starting up with, for example, the C and D drives on and their mirrors off. If you can't get the machine to start at all with all the drives turned on, I would suspect this. Hopefully your RAID controller company included a diagnostic utility that can be run to verify functioning. However, you might be using software drive mirroring through Windows disk management. If that is the case you could break the mirror and then recreate it. Make sure you have a good and verified full backup before doing this.
2) A bad driver or software is trying to load from the D drive. In this case, your server starts up when the D drive and its mirror are off because it can't get to the bad driver/software that is keeping windows from loading. If this is the case, then one of the above methods should help find the problem.
3) Other hardware issue. One of the mirror drives or related connections could be bad. Again, the raid diagnostic utilities could be helpful here.

That's not a complete list, but there are some troubleshooting steps you can use to further narrow down the cause. I can't stress enough not to start messing with the drives and RAID setup without having a backup of the machine in case something goes horribly wrong.