Windows Server 2008 BSOD after a system restore from older backup
Certainly using and testing backup and restore procedure is one of the most important tasks of any system administrator. In most of the cases this process is well documented and the regular tests provide peace of the mind.
But . . . You always get the odd one that makes your heart race. After what seemed to be a (nearly) standard restore procedure, the server got to a restart loop. The first step was to establish the reason for the server to keep on restarting. On boot and after pressing the F8 key you will have the boot menu that will allow you to disable automatic restart after fail. When we proceeded with the start procedure, after some time a BSOD screen was presented with the following error:
STOP: c00002e2 Directory Services could not start because of the following error: A device attached to the system is not functioning
As the restore process didn’t report any problem, this error message was quite unexpected. Only after many trials and extensive research i stumbled across a post suggesting to change date in BIOS of the server to a date shortly after the backup has occurred. This seemed to have turned out as a crucial information as the backup has been a few months old.
Once the date was changed, the server restarted happily and it was up and running soon.