Hello World !

I have decided to start blogging about some of the most complex issues we in the IT field run into and some times there is nothing on the net about it. Here is one that made me run in circles for days on end.

Windows Server 2003 R2 SP2 stuck at "applying computer settings"

We had patches applied to this server and rebooted. It hung at applying computer settings. Rebooting it in safe mode got stuck at loading drivers. Funny thing was if we let the server boot overnight, it eventually came up after about 10 hours but was extremely sluggish.

On the net there were some posts about APC software doing it, but we did not use APC here. Digging at past Change Requests (yes it does come in handy) it was mentioned that the OPS guys had requested the SAN team about 1.5 TB of extra disk space for this DFS server. Got the SAN guys to remove the newly presented LUNs as they had not been assigned to the DFS yet. 

Rebooted the server without the newly assigned LUNs and it came back fine. Got Hitachi involved and long story short, turns out that one of the LUN's was from a past decommissioned server and the locks from the LUN had not been cleared. (the disk had not been formatted before being deleted and the LUN removed). So when the LUN was presented to this server it confused Window's Disk Management and locked it up.