For some time now, I have been attempting to explain the seemingly random reboots of my email server [this doesn’t include or affect the web server]. I’ve narrowed it down to a few remaining hardware devices and their related drivers. It’s not the CPU, nor RAM, and maybe not the Motherboard, although I’m not quite sold on that one. What is left after you remove all of those [and HDDs and power supplies don’t cause these kinds of crashes] is the video adapter and the RAID card, not the on-board RAID.
So: in order to eliminate another factor, I moved the system drive from the on-board SATA controller to the RAID card last night. I had one glitch – it rebooted 30 minutes after I set it up, but that may be other factors. I flashed the motherboard BIOS, and updated the RAID drivers to the most current version. After that last reboot, I’ve seen no change or reboot so far. I was concerned that I’d come down this morning to a blue screen, but that didn’t happen. If it did, I would know that the RAID card has been the problem the whole time. However, all is sill up in the air.
Again, I wait. I wait and see if the server crashes. I wait and see if I have to either replace the motherboard or RAID card. If it works like it did before, rebooting on occasion, moving the drives tells me nothing. If it stops rebooting all together, moving the drives tells me the motheboard is bad. Perhaps if nothing changes, the problem is the RAID card. I don’t know.
I’m going to check the warranty and see what the time limit is. Maybe I can send it back for replacement…
::: jeffphillips.org ::: 
are you evaluating the crash dumps when the server goes down?
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Crash dumps? Who knows how to do that? I send the dump report to Microsoft who analyzes it and tells me it’s likely a hardware issue. I’ve analyzed the stop errors as well as I can which all point to the basic hardware components.
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Depends on who you get to in the support side of things…PSS was always pretty good at getting to the bottom of things for me…but then, the hardware I cared about then was all on the HCL and pretty well-known (proliant servers).
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Unfortunately, the HighPoint RAID card is not on the list. I should have studied deeper when shopping, but I think that what I looked for was x86 Windows 2003 and forgot to look for x64 certified driver. Looks like I”m going to lose my fifth drive since the motherboard has two RAID controllers and only one has RAID 5 with only 4 ports. I guess I”ll have a cold spare, then.
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