Strange issue with Windows server

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Posted by prashant1979, 05-30-2014, 10:49 AM
I have a customer who has a dedicated Windows 2008 R2 server with us. The server has on-board Raid 1 configured. Today, suddenly the server went down and when we reboot the server, it first showed some error with Raid 1 and then after another reboot could boot to Windows. However, we could not login to the server using the login credentials we had. I then tried to use an old password that I had on file and could login. When I checked the server, I found that surprisingly the server had booted to a state it was in June 2013. I am unable to understand the reason for such a weird behaviour. I disabled Raid and could not boot with any of the two drives. However, I could see that both the drives individually had old data. Is it possible for Raid to boot to an old state? How to bring back the current state?
Posted by luxonhost, 05-31-2014, 07:26 AM
It sounds like you had a bad drive that fell out of Mirror RAID sometime back and it decided to come back online to mirror the data across to the 2nd good drive. I would suggest that you pull one of the drives out and replace it with a new one so you can at least attempt some form of data recovery. I am guessing you have no backup?
Posted by storminternet, 05-31-2014, 07:35 AM
Well, normally any issue with RAID should not revert the server stage to that of couple of months back, neither there is any setting which could restore server to its old stage. What I guess is it might be possible that server got restored with its old "Good known configuration" due to some failure occurred. Windows servers support a feature of backup and feature so you can restore your Windows server as it is to a stage which was backed up when server was in a good condition. But here in this case it needs to check exactly what has caused to server be restored to its old stage like is there any auto config set in RAID or in BIOS or in server config etc. to restore old backup. But this is not good to set this as you may loose some of your important latest data if server gets restored for some small failures automatically.
Posted by storminternet, 05-31-2014, 07:37 AM
additionally in such cases when you are unable to connect server due to some issues, you can ask your DataCenter to attach a KVMoIP using which you can check server status remotely to check exactly what is going on server. You can check server status through KVMoIP even when server is down or failed or crashed. KVMoIP helps to troubleshoot such issues easily.
Posted by Srv24x7, 05-31-2014, 10:09 AM
Hi, Usually, when such crash occurs, windows when booted the next time, give various options to start with like normal boot or last know good configuration. You should really have the KVM access of the server and reboot it cleanly once again and check whether it goes in properly. There is always a possibility of RAID replication failing sometime, so no data was replicated onto each drive and the drive that was current went down with current data and left only with second drive having old replicated data.

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