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I'm fairly certain some data on my server got corrupted and from a dialog box that popped up I think one of the things that got corrupted is logonui.exe

I think this because while the server goes through BIOS and the windows loading splash screen, when it finished that it goes to a black screen with just a mouse cursor that I can move around. But most of the services come back up, for example: DNS, DHCP, DFS, and the print service all load up while it's sitting on the black screen.

Is there anything I can do to repair the logon screen? Maybe copy a file off another copy of Server 2008, get something off the original media (which I have) or bring the system back to a previous restore point?

Thanks! I'm in the weeds right now...

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If your server OS files have been corrupted, trying a manual repair is pointless: restore from backup or, if you do not have OS backup, reinstall from your original media and restore the data.

The reason behind this is that it's hard to know if all the files that make up your running OS installation are intact. Think about other types of file that could have been corrupted: data files, not just application binaries. These are next impossible to restore one by one and a single missed file can cause your whole server to become unstable.

Overall, it's not worth your time trying to recover manually from that kind of event: scratch and restore is typically way easier and faster and it's also far likely to be successful.

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  • To follow up and provide closure for anyone reading this, we got the server booting again using sfc (system file checker, exact command: sfc /scannow /offbootdir=c:\ /offwindir=c:\windows) from the install media but there were definitely corruption or missing files from the incident we never fixed. After having large issues with the server for the next week we pulled all the files and Exchange DB off it and recovered it to the last good image we had. Thankfully our backups were good.
    – Josh R
    Jun 10, 2012 at 0:26

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