Sounds like it may have been a hardware (disk) drive failure where the registry 
is found.

Maybe the registry hive was not available.  This would also explain why it 
wouldn't reboot.


Does the PDC even get to the 'last good menu' option?  If so, try it.

Can you restore from the 1/10 backups?

Other things to consider:

Are the disk drives mirrored?  If yes, maybe you could try booting from the 
other drive by updating boot.ini

Do you have a BDC?  Promote it to PDC and recreate this server from scratch as 
a BDC and restore from TSM.


Thanks and God bless,

sal

Sal Mangiapane

Servant Technology, Inc
RR 1 Box 435
FOMBELL, PA 16123

Office: 724-758-3981
Mobile: 724-263-6569
FAX:    724-752-7372
E-Mail: salm AT servanttechnology DOT com


> -----Original Message-----
> From: ADSM: Dist Stor Manager [mailto:ADSM-L AT VM.MARIST DOT EDU]On Behalf Of
> Lisa Cabanas
> Sent: Thursday, January 16, 2003 9:29 AM
> To: ADSM-L AT VM.MARIST DOT EDU
> Subject: WINNT 4.0 SP5 PDC wasn't backing up the software hive in the
> registry
>
>
> Good morning, all,
>
> I am trying to figure this one out, and I need help (it was a long night).
> Last night one of our PDC bit the dust, and I was attempting to rebuild the
> client on identical hardware (and dissimilar hardware, too).
>
> It didn't work (it's always worked before).  What I determined to be the
> problem was that there were NO software registry hives backed up for that
> client at all.  The rest of them were there, and it was like it should be
> (1 active and 4 inactive versions).  I have an AIX 4.3.3 ML10 with 4.2.1.9
> server code and the client code was at 4.2.1.20.
>
> The PDC's last successful backup was on 1/10 and stopped backing up 1/11,
> due to
>
> ANS4036E An error occurred saving the registry key.
>
> ANS1512E Scheduled event 'NT_2230' failed.  Return code = 4.
>
>
> It did this 1/11 thru yesterday, when our OPS staff notified me that there
> was a problem.  After it would return the error code, it would set up for
> the next night's backup.  Unfortunately, there were major network problems
> over the weekend, and they were told they didn't need to weed out the
> "real" errors/failures from the ones that were caused by connectivity, so
> this didn't get caught until yesterday.) When I got on to the server, there
> were messages about the password in the registry (which I thought was the
> problem with the registry), so I did a dsmcutil updatepw, and stopped and
> restarted the scheduler.
>
> I tried to force a back up, and then got this error msg:
>
> 01/15/2003 12:47:21PM ANS4023E Error processing '\\d5n01\c$': file
> input/output error
>
> And I asked if the server could be rebooted- and it never came back up.
>
> Why was the reg key gone?  There should have been *at least* inactive
> copies, if the registry error registered with TSM as a "deletion" (3 vers
> if deleted).
>
> Any body have any ideas what when wrong?  I know I don't, and I need to be
> able to explain my failure restoring the PDC with TSM (I have done bare
> metals before, but my boss doesn't particularly care for me, and this
> failure is a real opportunity for him-- no body cares about the backups,
> they just care about the restores-- and when it works it is unremarkable,
> but when it doesn't it's almost catastrophic).
>
> any help would be appreciated!!
>
> -lisa
>