Sorry if i don't make any senses, bad grammar or spelling since I've been up all night since 3am this morning trying to get my Win2k3 Standard R2 server to work.
Problem:
I did some Windows update around 3am this morning but during the update process. I lost Remote desktop connection as my machine is do several attempts to connect with the remote server. I cancel the attempt after several try. I figure i can remote desktop back in again if i wait for a bit but I couldn't re-establish the connection with my remote server. So, I drove to the Datacenter to check it out and it turn out the machine have rebooted and I'm stuck with "NTDetect failed" error message. After some googling, I was trying to fix this error by copying NTLDR and NTDetect.COM into C: but when i tried to use the Win2k3 CD to go into Windows Setup and repair. I got an error message telling me that "Setup did not find any hard disk drives installed in your computer...".
After some googling, I found the two Maxtor SATA hard disks might be the problem and one soultion that i found was to disable the SATA or set it to IDE since the motherboard have nvida RAID controller onboard. I check the BIOS and the RAID is set to disabled and then i tried to disable SATA and only enable IDE. It still give me the same error message about not able to find any hard disk.
I'm on my last rope here. I'm short of reformatting the hard disk and do a fresh reinstall but I will like to avoid this.
Does anyone know if cancel Remote desktop connection attempt during Windows update process cause this NTdetect failed problem or something else that might related to my hardware. I can assure you that two SATA hard disks shown on BIOS.
The soultion to NTDecte failed problem seem to be just copying NTLDR and NTdectect.com into C:\ but since i can't even get to Repair mode during Windows setup with no disk install error. Can someone recommand how to solve this problem?
The motherboard that i use is ASUS M2N-MX SE AM2 NVIDIA GeForce6100 / nForce430 and the BIOS is American Megatrends Inc.
Thanks
update: I was trying to use Ubuntu live CD to copy over NTDLR and NTDECTEC.com files onto my C drive but live CD failed due to some Emask error on hard disk. I was thinking the server is probably gone and as last effort I try to run the Windows recovery console again and this time it find the hard disk and i was able to copy those two files over.
My server live once but when i got home I can't remote desktop into my server but as far as everything else goes. It seem to be fine. Does anyone know how to trouble shoot remote desktop issue?
Well, that unfortunately is the first problem: nVidia onboard RAID controller. For whatever reason, onboard controllers are always failing for
I hate to say it, but you might already be at this point. Onboard SATA RAID controllers from either nVidia, Intel are ALL useless. They always end up failing after N months and recovery from them is never smooth or carefree as the hopes of a true RAID solution really is.
I have this same motherboard and I tried the RAID feature on it too. After 3+ months, it failed. I started over. Got on with my life and learned to never use onboard/software RAID ever. Period. If you want the redundancy RAID provides, buy a 3rd party card with real hardware RAID.
No. This is not the problem. the updates are ran by the update service. And they are not affected by the remote desktop disconnect. Its most probably some hardware failure. In this case a clean install is not an option. Because the setup process doesn't recognize the disks...