The power cord-seriously?

[Jeff Golas]

Drives can go bad...but I sincerely would hope that they would use SOME kind of raid on it and not just a single OS drive.

Another possibility is that it may need a firmware update for the disk controller...sometimes there's certain delays that modern things need to boot properly and the firmwares get tweaked to allow for the proper delays. Stuff can boot so fast that the disks don't get a chance to initialize.

Event logs would certainly show any kind of disk errors, and you wouldn't hurt anything by looking at them. Right click Start Button, go to Computer Management, and expand the event log category on the left, then look under Windows Logs > Application Log or System Log (system is the better one to check).

[DebAmstutz]

Thanks, Jeff!

[Mark]

Completely agree with Jeff G!

[Jeff Zylstra]

Another possibility is that it may need a firmware update for the disk controller...sometimes there's certain delays that modern things need to boot properly and the firmwares get tweaked to allow for the proper delays. Stuff can boot so fast that the disks don't get a chance to initialize.

Sage advice.  But I wouldn't let the tech work on your server's disk controller without a good backup, regardless of what he/she says.  I did that once in the dark ages of RAID, and it rendered the data unreadable.  The phone support tech said it was safe and no problem to do the upgrade (for him maybe) but I had to do a restore.   

I also liked your comment about the delays.  I have a Windows service that I had to set to "start with a delay" because it would check for something before DNS was even operational, and would error out all the time.  You'll find these warnings in the Event Log - System log.  It's an easy fix if that's the case.

[DebAmstutz]

I have the invoice from the IT guy and it says he updated firmware on server motherboard and raid controller to fix the boot problems.  It hasn't crapped out anymore, so it appears to have fixed whatever was causing the problem.

[Jeff Golas]

I LOVE IT WHEN I'M RIGHT!