Question : Dell Poweredge 1800 SBS 2003 reboots at 'Applying Computer Settings'

Client has SBS 2003 on Dell Poweredge 1800 (7 years old and out of Warranty). For the last few days it has suddenly rebooted overnight with no clues in Event Viewer. Last night I got email warnings that the OS drive was running out of space and, Murphy's Law, they had a power outage last night and battery didn't last long enough for graceful shutdown.

Situation:

Poweredge has amber light blinking on front panel and rear panel (which, as far as I know, indicates a hardware problem). I reseated/moved all memory chips, removed any extraneous cards and ran Dell diagnostics successsfully (all tests passed).

When I try and boot normally the server will Post fine and Windows will load to the point of "Applying Computer Settings". Then it will just reboot - no bluescreen, etc.

Same result with "Last known Good Configuration".

If I boot to Safe Mode, it will get to the point of asking for username/password and then reboot without warning.

RAID drives all show as fine and I can boot to Bart PE environment and see all data. Also have good backups so all data is safe. It's downtime that's the issue.

Any ideas why boot would fail at "applying computer settings" or what to try before a restore, paying Dell to replace hardware, etc.?

Answer : Dell Poweredge 1800 SBS 2003 reboots at 'Applying Computer Settings'

charelstasse:

Thanks for the suggestion but it ended up being a corrupt admin account and there is still an unknown hardware issue that Dell can't pinpoint. Was able to work with Microsoft to get server back up and am gong to replace it.