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Did a lightning stike kill the Nancy Street Server C: drive? Recovery hampered by a flat battery!

On Monday morning the 29-Sep-2003 the Nancy Street network was powered-up after a complete rest over Sunday night. The Windows 2000 Advanced Server stopped at a blue screen to tell me the boot device was unavailable. All attempts to boot failed. After some difficulty, the failed 1997 vintage 3GB drive was placed in a spare machine and found to have an unrecognised format. A chkdsk /F command inspected the disk, rebooted and performed more repairs and the disk was now readable. I quickly copied all of my personal data off the disk, which luckily wasn't much, just some config files and Windows settings that would have taken hours to remember otherwise.

I decided to make the best of the situation and take the opportunity to upgrade from Win2K to the new Win 2003 Advanced Server. The format and fresh install got as far as copying the setup files to the hard disk and stalled. After a reset it was found that the primary disk had vanished from the BIOS. I decided to trash the old 3GB boot disk and get a new one.

The disk started to fail a week earlier following a storm and power surge that caused 2 of the 4 PCs in the house to reboot. After this event, the server would be very sluggish immediately after reboot and then return to normal after 10-15 minutes. I assumed that this was an OS corruption due to an interrupted Windows Update which was taking place at the time of the power surge. It is now obvious that the disk was somehow subtly damaged back then and it took another 10 days for it to die completely.

Flat Battery

I get into the car to drive to the local PC shop to buy a disk, but I find the car battery is as dead as Elvis. My friend Rob drops-in to give me a lift to get a new 80GB drive (for AU$150 cash) and helps me install it. The installation of Windows 2003 Enterprise Server then completes without problems. The new disk is only 3% used, so over the coming months I plan to convert every music CD in the house into a huge MP3 jukebox and use some of the wasted disk space.

The car battery recharged and then dischared completely again overnight. It was found that the radio arial in the boot was stuck half extended and the tiny motor driving it was stuck on, trying to move the arial, thereby causing a continuous power drain. The RACV mechanic disconnects the arial and it remains at half mast.

IIS Lockdown

Despite hours of solid work and research, the default "lockdown" security mode of IIS 6 is causing trouble with ASP and ASPX web pages. The ASP pages were brought to life by enabling 'Parent Path', which is not recommended. The ASPX applications continue to give Server Application Unavailable and the logs show status code 500. An accidental solution was found a week later, see the Server 2003 Upgrade page.

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