I’ve Made A Huge Mistake

Most adminsitrators RDP into their servers daily and every now and then install updates and then reboot a server. The terminal server session closes and you move on. Life is good. Later you go back to RDP into the box and you get nothing. When you finally make it over to the console you notice that the box is still up and the logs show no reboot, what just happened happened?

1.) You didn’t use the /console or /admin switch. This provides you with console level access which is where you should reboot a box from. Since you are not at the console level you have to ask other process if it’s ok to shutdown. They can say no but your RDP session is already closed and you think it’s rebooted.This blog post goes into more detail.

http://blogs.technet.com/askperf/archive/2008/03/18/hotfix-installs-remote-desktop-and-the-reboot-that-wasn-t.aspx

2.) You did us the /console or /admin switch and it still didn’t work, you can never win can you?

Solution: Try applying this update.

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;971310&sd=rss&spid=3198

Hope this helps. You could also use shutdown.exe /r/f to force it but you could lose data.

This entry was posted on Friday, June 19th, 2009 at 8:34 pm and is filed under Server 2003. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.