Help Desk Geek – Help Desk Tips For IT Pros

This is a guest post written by Jese Calderon a computer professional and a friend of mine living in Boston MA. I thank Jese for being a reader of this blog and contribute to its content.

It is a nice day in the IT department. Walked in the office, sip some dunkin’ java, and logged on to my Help Desk and with minimal requests to attend. All of a sudden a disturbing call came through my phone and when they say, “I think there is a problem with the server”¦” in my head I am like, oh no”¦ So right away! To the bat mobile! And to the server room you rush to and you come upon this ugly face on the monitor:

When I was dealing with this, it is a good thing that I was dealing with a stand alone server. I guess SOMEONE was tampering with this server but no worries because during a situation like this it is best not to light up candles, place saints around the server, and expect a miracle.  

First, this could have been caused by a BIOS update that went wrong, messing with the Registry or a malware but most likely an update went wrong. To recover from this you will have to use system recovery and run the CHKDSK utility with the (/r) switch to automatically repair any errors when found during Check Disk.

In CHKDSK the system will actually look for corrupted and missing files found in the MBR. When I actually inserted the Windows Installation CD to try to repair this I also gotten an unexpected error during the process.

So right when I thought I was getting closer to what I thought would be an easy fix it became a hunt to search for the actual drivers for the hard disks. I was working on a PowerEdge 2550 which was using RAID. The problem was that the system did not have the proper drivers to actually communicate the RAID Controller. I had to go to Dell’s site and hunt down the right drivers for this model.

This process is similar to other servers or desktops experiencing the same issue. Make sure you have a Floppy drive and a handy Floppy diskette because it WILL come in handy. Once downloaded the RAID Driver files, I copied them and saved them on a floppy diskette. Mind you do NOT write these files into a CD because you will come to a dead end during the installation process. I will also show you that.

As soon as you have your drivers saved in the Floppy diskette, boot up from the Windows Installation CD and then Press F6 while the installation load is running.

After a moment you will come upon a setup screen notifying to specify whether have a disk to specify the drivers or not. Press (S) when you see this screen.

You will be reminded to insert a Manufacturer-Supplied hardware support disk into “Drive A”. I previously reminded not to write your driver files into a CD-R disk but to a Floppy Diskette. This would be the dead end that you will run into if you did. Remember that Drive A is almost always the Floppy drive unless your server by any means does not have one. At this prompt you will insert the diskette in into the Floppy drive and press ENTER when ready.

The drivers will be loaded and installed and directed to another setup screen. And then Press R to Repair Windows and continue on to the Recovery Console.

Once when you are in the Recovery Console, select the drive in which windows is installed and then enter your Administrator credentials.

You will be on C:\WINDOWS> Path and from there you enter “chkdsk /r”

The system will run a full check and repair what ever is corrupted on the hard disk. This may take a few to several minutes.

At the end you will be given a brief detail on how many was detected and how many files were repaired. You may try running the utility again to make sure everything went smooth or if you can find something else but otherwise Reboot your system and it will be back up and running like the problem never occurred.