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I have a windows server 2003 system that is hosted remotely and I don't have physical/console access to.
Most of the time when I try to reboot it (remote desktop, start/shutdown/reboot) it doesn't successfully complete the reboot and I have to file a ticket for someone at the hosting company to force power cycle it.

Something appears to be keeping it from completing the shutdown properly, but I don't know how to tell what.

It definitely starts the reboot process - remote desktop is disconnected and I can't reconnect - but it doesn't seem to ever finish shutting down. Event viewer doesn't make the problem obvious - it shows when I request the shutdown, but some regularly occurring application messages continue to go into the log after that point, indicating that something is still trying to keep going with normal processing.

Is there some way I can get more logging or more information in event viewer so that I can track down what is stopping the reboot? I assume it's stuck waiting on a service to flag completion, but I don't know which one or why.

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2 Answers 2

Reset to default
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This is certainly not a unique situation and I have no real idea what the problem is but I suggest that instead of rebooting the way you are doing it you use shutdown.exe. For some reason that has been successful both times I've had the same problem.

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  • I can second Johns advice. I had a similar issue after installing a big load of updates. My RDP-session was disconnected but the maschine wont reboot and was still reachable via ping. So I made a remote shutdown with: <shutdown /r /f /m \\Servername> and that fixed it
    – Phil Swiss
    Feb 3, 2010 at 11:20
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If you can find out the process name, you can write a script and run it using Group Policy under the Shutdown section. In the script, you can look for all instances of this program that are running and terminate them. I had to do this for my wifi connection program which always hang my computer on shutdown.

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