Problem starting a server

[Kirt]

I recently met a problem in the office with an Exchange server.

Under normal circumstances, the server manages the messaging of the company and its backups at night. It also planned a reboot daily at night.

Until then everything was fine, only then, this morning I found the server blocked in the phase of the boot (black screen at launch).

And so I was forced to cut power supply, and then restart it manually to do it again, knowing that pending the messaging of the company was out of service.

And it is launching the new server I detected a strange noise and regular from the case, much like the hard disk of a PC standard before release ... except that there is a server and I can not say with certainty if the noise is normal but I think not. It was very difficult to load and even rebooting itself, once again to stay stuck at the boot stage at the beginning.

In short, I finally arrive at the revive and once connected the server, everything is finally back, but it leaves me thinking that the problem is likely to repeat on the next restart (which I disabled as a precaution) and I wonder if there really is a problem with the internal hard drive of the server or if it is another thing.

[Nihir]

What about the event log of the server?

Generally, if there are bad sectors on the hard disk, it is supposed to indicate otherwise as there are errors in phases of writing.

Otherwise, there is no audit software on the server? Utilities to ensure its proper functioning?

[Kirt]

I checked the event log on the server but nothing reported from the classic events. No anomaly in there at first.

I also tried to write to the hard disk to see how it reacts but it looks OK too, now that it is well launched.

2009/04/11-04: 02:46 Starting the control module power
2009/04/13-16: 58:59 Starting the control module power
2009/04/14-09: 16:09 Communication OK

Basically, he did nothing the 12/04 knowing that the same problem was reported yesterday, which explains the launch of the manual 13/04 to 16h58.

Maybe I'll try a restart late in the day to see. Anyway thank you for the quick response

[Nihir]

A power problem? Isn't there a redundant power supply on the server? When blocked at startup, you can measure voltage with a multimeter?

[Kirt]

So the hard drive seems to wear eventually. But I'm not sure it's solved.

As for the power, the server is directly connected to an inverter, as another server side has no problem to reboot.