Help...Keeps crashing every 3 days (W2K)

[ruserious]

I'm running a production server with Win 2000 SP4 and all the updates and patches to Jan. 2006.

Server has a raid configuration, 2.4 Ghz processor and 500 MB of Ram.

Basically, every 3-7 days the server crashes. I usually turn it off and on again manually and it starts up again. It then continues for another 3-7 days and crashes again. The only meaningful message I can see in the event log is:

The previous system shutdown at 12:09:25 AM on 3/29/2006 was unexpected.

Does anyone have any ideas that I can try? Thanks in advance.

[motoflop]

We had once w2k server (from Dell), which crashed after being few days up and running. We were puzzled, what was the reason, until we started to monitor non-paged memory usage for the server. We found that kernel non-paged memory usage was slowly increasing. So there was some device driver or service, which allocated more and more non-paged memory. When windows kernel non-paged memory pool was exhausted, the server crashed. In our case faulty program was Dell server management software. After disabling it, server didn't crash anymore.

So check that memory leaking is not causing your problems. Use task manager and check if non-paged memory usage is increasing.

[ruserious]

Thanks for the tip motoflop. I also got another tip from a co-worker I don't usually run into that he had a similar problem and found out it was caused by the kernal not communicating with the tape drive properly. He discovered it by looking at the memory dump.

In either case, I'll investigate both and let you know how it goes.