SBS 2003 boot stalls at acpitabl.dat

raidraid1windows-sbs-2003

I have a SBS 2003 server running for 3 year without any problems, and few days ago it freezes during the boot.

System is using two 500 Gb drives in RAID1 (Intel Matrix 7.5)

After trying to load in safe mode, boot stops on acpitabl.dat.

First idea was that there is a problem with RAID although disk status was OK, and RAID status was Rebuild. I tried to boot with each drive, and one gives me the same problem, and the other drive is failing to load.

Took both drives out, and checked it on a different machine. One drive is dead, other is without any problems.

Returned the good drive back in SBS 2003 with changed status to Degraded, but the problem is still the same.

I also have a clean SBS 2003 copy installed on this drive (previous installation), which loads smooth and quick.

So, I believe the main problem is this installed version of SBS 2003. Did not make any hardware changes, did not make any updates (not sure about any automatic windows updates lately).

Since there are tons posts about this problem, and no clear solution, I am trying to figure how to repair SBS 2003 installation, since there are some installed programs on this installation which I cannot re-install without additional issues.

Best Answer

I had similar problem with one XP on RAID, which broke during conversion to virtual machine. It got stuck on acpitabl.dat.

What I did to fix it was to boot with Windows 2012 CD opened the console with Shift+F10 and ran chkdsk /f c:. After this, the machine was able to boot normally.

Related Topic