I have a customer that has a Windows 2008 Web Server Edition. It has given them a long history of having issues with booting cleanly.
What is observed is that it will boot and let you login. You can ping localhost and the gateway. It isn’t listening on port 80 (http) or 3389 (rdp). When you try to open the Network Control Panel, it attempts to load, but nothing ever shows up in the panel. The Services control panel fails to open. When you attempt to restart the World Wide Publishing service or other services via the appropriate net start commands, the command never completes.
Recently I had the pleasure of debugging this problem with the System Engineer at our customer. It had been approximately a year since this server last rebooted. We tried the notes that worked last time which involved booting it with the network unplugged and then plugging it in after the server had fully booted. That did not resolve the problem. I should add that this is a virtual machine in a vSphere deployment so plugging in the cable didn’t involve going to a datacenter.
Some searching brought up a few promising articles the two most useful are as follows:
http://www.edugeek.net/forums/windows-server-2008/49622-web-server-2008-services-wont-start.html
http://www.networksteve.com/forum/topic.php/Windows_Web_Server_2008_Network_not_right_after_Reboot/?TopicId=1192&Posts=9
We ultimately got this sorted out playing the boot into safe mode, disable services, try booting normally, repeat until it works game as both the Services and Network Control Panels functioned properly in safe mode.
IPv6 was fully disabled during troubleshooting.
Right now it is booting properly and rebooting just fine with the following services permanently disabled:
• Print Spooler
• IP Helper Service (related to IPv6)
• Remote Registry
I’m pretty sure the culprit is the Print Spooler service. This system is in the DMZ and not on the domain so the Remote Registry access shouldn’t be taking place. I believe the IP Helper Service would start in safe mode, but I disabled it when I removed all IPv6 items as part of debugging this problem.
One of the links above does mention the print spooler as being a possible problem for Windows 2008 Web Server Edition.
