G
Guest
Hello,
I've seen a lot of discussion on problems with restarts/shutdowns. Here's
some more information to consider:
We have approximately 1800 workstations, which we routinely send MS security
bulletin patches to through SMS. We normally have SMS do the restart or have
the program do it if the restart can't be postponed. Approximately 95% of
our workstations are W2K SP4. Over the years we've noticed a pattern
develop. Every time we send a bulletin requiring a restart, we have
approximately 40 workstations (not necessarily the same ones each time) that
don't appear to restart properly. These are always the W2K workstations and
never the XP (all hardware is the same except for our laptops which are all
now XP and have not shown the problem since they were upgraded in July). At
first we thought it was a Power Management issue (we called it a "Deep Sleep"
problem) because it looked like they were going to sleep and unable to wake.
We updated the BIOS on all our equipment, which appeared to fix a problem
where the OS was not using its power settings but was using those in the BIOS
but it did not get rid of the "Deep Sleep" problem. Upon further
investigation we discovered that the problem predominantly occurred after our
security bulletins were released (with a restart).
The symptoms:
1. No signal to the monitor.
2. Mouse and keyboard don't appear to respond.
3. Holding the power button for 10 seconds may or may not power down the PC.
4. Pressing the power button to turn the PC on if it appeared to turn off
in the previous step causes the following:
a. Fans kick on at high speed.
b. Hard drive spins up.
c. CD-ROM drive is accessed.
d. Floppy drive is not accessed.
e. No signal to the monitor.
5. If you do get it to come up, another symptom that appears to be from the
same cause is a logon screen that never comes up when you press CTRL-ALT-DEL.
It looks like it's going to but doesn't. Instead the welcome to windows
screen keeps appearing.
It is hard to recreate the problem. I was able to only do it once on a
machine that I had never had an issue with.
The current workaround:
Remove all power from the workstation for approximately 20 seconds by
unplugging the power cord or turning off the electrical outlet strip.
This usually brings the machine back up but it has also been found that the
problem will persist until a good OS Shutdown is done from the Logon screen.
In summary ...
This appears to be a W2K OS issue during the restart/shutdown process. Is
there a way to stop this? I've heard that there are differnet levels of
shutting down. Is there a registry setting that can force a complete
environment reset like what is experienced when shutting down and removing
the power?
I've seen a lot of discussion on problems with restarts/shutdowns. Here's
some more information to consider:
We have approximately 1800 workstations, which we routinely send MS security
bulletin patches to through SMS. We normally have SMS do the restart or have
the program do it if the restart can't be postponed. Approximately 95% of
our workstations are W2K SP4. Over the years we've noticed a pattern
develop. Every time we send a bulletin requiring a restart, we have
approximately 40 workstations (not necessarily the same ones each time) that
don't appear to restart properly. These are always the W2K workstations and
never the XP (all hardware is the same except for our laptops which are all
now XP and have not shown the problem since they were upgraded in July). At
first we thought it was a Power Management issue (we called it a "Deep Sleep"
problem) because it looked like they were going to sleep and unable to wake.
We updated the BIOS on all our equipment, which appeared to fix a problem
where the OS was not using its power settings but was using those in the BIOS
but it did not get rid of the "Deep Sleep" problem. Upon further
investigation we discovered that the problem predominantly occurred after our
security bulletins were released (with a restart).
The symptoms:
1. No signal to the monitor.
2. Mouse and keyboard don't appear to respond.
3. Holding the power button for 10 seconds may or may not power down the PC.
4. Pressing the power button to turn the PC on if it appeared to turn off
in the previous step causes the following:
a. Fans kick on at high speed.
b. Hard drive spins up.
c. CD-ROM drive is accessed.
d. Floppy drive is not accessed.
e. No signal to the monitor.
5. If you do get it to come up, another symptom that appears to be from the
same cause is a logon screen that never comes up when you press CTRL-ALT-DEL.
It looks like it's going to but doesn't. Instead the welcome to windows
screen keeps appearing.
It is hard to recreate the problem. I was able to only do it once on a
machine that I had never had an issue with.
The current workaround:
Remove all power from the workstation for approximately 20 seconds by
unplugging the power cord or turning off the electrical outlet strip.
This usually brings the machine back up but it has also been found that the
problem will persist until a good OS Shutdown is done from the Logon screen.
In summary ...
This appears to be a W2K OS issue during the restart/shutdown process. Is
there a way to stop this? I've heard that there are differnet levels of
shutting down. Is there a registry setting that can force a complete
environment reset like what is experienced when shutting down and removing
the power?