One of my Co-workers was using a server to copy a DVD using CloneDVD and Nero. Don't ask why she was doing it on the server? Anyway she said that it locked up, everything but the task manager. So she Hard-reset the server. (Reset button) Now it won't boot, it goes past the bios and searches for a boot record and then stops just displaying a black screen with a cursor in the top-left corner. Any suggestions on how I can recover this would be great. It's a DHCP / Ghost Server, so it really would be pretty important not to lose the images stored on the HD.

I know it's a server, but my win2k3 server hangs if I don't unplug my backup USB drive. Ya, a server with a USB drive for backup. Don't laugh! On a side note, CloneDVD + AnyDVD by chance? I think AnyDVD installs drivers which may be the cause?

Found the Solution, I booted using the Windows Server '08 disk and chose the repair option. And of course lucky me it didn't even recognize a copy of server 08 being on the machine, hit next anyway and got an options screen, chose Command prompt I then went to c:\boot and found that it was a pretty empty dir, so I copied the boot directory from the Server '08 dvd to the C drive, then I ran bootrec.exe. and rebooted, now at this point instead of sitting blank it told me that the bootmgr was missing. So I booted back to the cd and went back into the command prompt and typed the following: bcdedit /export c:\bcd_backup ren c:\boot\bcd bcd.old rootrec /rebuildbcd Then obviously it just re did what i had done previously but I figured that was a cleaner way to rebuild the bcd, and if I were to restart I would get the same problem again (bootmgr missing) So before I rebooted this time since I have a partitioned drive I made sure that the partition with my server '08 install was set as the active partition by doing the following: diskpart list disk select disk # (My server '08 was on disk 0) list partition select partition # (Mine was on 1) active exit Then I restarted the computer and low and behold the world was saved....

could have done the same with recovery console and fixmbr / fixboot with a whole lot less effort and risk. Question you have to ask yourself is what removed the boot record? Can you say infection?

I didn't see a traditional recovery console option like WinXP and Server '03 has, or even anything similiar to the recovery options you get with WinVista. The serer '08 disk I have gave me just three options other then installing, Restore from back up, Memory test, and Command Prompt. The best I could get with the server '08 disk was the command prompt and using the "BootRec.exe" Initially I wasn't sure which switch to use, so I tried them all with out success. "/fixMBR" "/FixBoot" "/ScanOS" and what ever the fourth option was. That is when I ended up pulling my hair out, Then I think what really was the fix was using diskpart to make the partition the active one?

My bad. Thought I was still in the 2003 forum. Yep you are right 2008 relies more on backups then recovery console. Even 2003 recovery console can't mark the drive active. I usually use the newer version of fdisk but diskpart is also good. I would still be concerned about how the active bit got turned off. This is not accessable by the file system so a crash should not of affected it. My concern would be you have a rouge program running on the server. Would not be surprising if you have folks using the server for other purposes.

I'm confused about what happened, but the concern about the server being a bot is very low, it sits on an isolated lan. I have no idea what my co-worker did to it.