2009
07.07
07.07
Symptoms: Windows 2003 hangs after booting and never reach the login screen.
Background: ACPI stands for Advanced Configuration and Power Interface. It is an open standard that defines platform for hardware discovery, configuration, power management and monitoring.
Possible Cause and Resolution
- Cause: CMOS Battery is Dying
Resolution: Goto CMOS setup, scroll to POWER MANAGEMENT SETUP, hit Enter, look at it, Hit ESC to exit, Anwser Y to save.
- Cause: RAID Problem
Resolution:
- Turn off the server.
- Unplug one of the hard disk in your RAID.
- Boot the server. The RAID status now should change to degraded
- You should now be able to see the login screen.
- Login, do the necessary backup
- Plugin the hard disk, rebuild the RAID array with its software
I stopped my search as the solution no 2 solved my problem 
I am still not clear with the exact cause, but I suspect that the RAID controller was having problem synchronizing between hard disks (my server is using RAID-1).
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I never comment on these things after finding a solution, but this time after looknig for 2 hours and comping across the SIMPLEST solution that worked perfectly, I needed to. You made my night! Yes, basically break the raid if you have one, remove a disk physically, and then boot. It worked. Run a chkdsk/f, get it to boot again perfectly, and then shut down, re-add the drive and have it resynch. Whalla! Done! Thanks ever so much again. Sometimes people don’t post something that is obvious, and I should have known better myself. Getting stuck and being frustrated it’s easy to overlook. -Mike
Thank YOU. You have made my day
TWO DAYS I’VE BEEN FIGHTING THIS AND YOU SOLVED IT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
You’re my hero!!!!!!!!
Thanks.
Mike.
man you r great thank u
Well, how about the people who doesn`t have RAIDs on the machine?
All I do have is one IDE HDD and CD-ROM (not RAID, not SATA, not SCSI).
All the symptoms are same – haning before Win 2k3 splash and hangs at acpitabl.dat in Safe Mode. 4 days here dying about the issue.. ;(
Ok I’m gonna give this a bang we have done everything else to try fix this including upgrading Bios, changing some arb filename etc, and nothing has worked, have pretty much killed google searching for something that can work, and then I typed into google
“fix Acpitabl.dat” and got to this page, It’s Sunday and Maybe God is smiling down on me, so I’ll go try and let you know if it worked for me……
Problem is I got Raid 5 and undoing the raid didnt seem to help
I even changed the Bios Batt just in case …. also didnt do much.
Thank you so much!
Saved me from an all nighter!!
Domain controller power supply failed and when I installed new one I hit the same problem. Removed one of the disks and it booted fine!!
Cheers.
Ok just thought I would tell you guys what happened, we took the raid out stuffed it into another computer, and still got the same problem, after 2 days search finally found the drivers for the disc tried to make a boot disc with nlite with the drivers but didint work eventually found a usb external floppy drive, yea floppy drive a: then booted pressed “R” to load the drivers and it worked
we then booted into the win 2k3 cd and ran the second repair from the cd and whooooooohooooooooooooooo it booted………..
Acpitabl.bat was a bitch to fix
You are my HERO. I had the same Acpiabl.dat problem. I pulled a hard drive and did a complete backup. Put the Hard Drive that I backed up in the Server and took the other one out and low and behold it booted. I put the other Hard Drive back in and get the same error though. One Hard Drive and I’m fine. Should I kill the partitions on the second Hard Drive?
John
Had this problem with no RAID after trying to boot up with an (apparently) unsupported USB 2.0 disc plugged in, I just removed the SATA controller I had added into PCI and it booted up into Safe Mode, then put it back in and for some reason it worked again.
I had a IBM HS20 blade do this (it was complaining about low voltage on the battery). Reseated the blade, no go. Tried LKG, no go. Got in a heated debate with IBM about how it’s a hardware issue. Fix? Changed the RTC battery.
My server board was 6 months old. It would eventually boot with 2 TB Hard Drives mirrored. Back to one hard drive after a reboot, same damn issue. Do you guys think it’s the cmos battery. I am out of ideas!
John
I was getting the exact same error, it turn out in my case one of the memory module got loose. So, if you are having problems make sure all of your components are snug in place. I am glad I checked that before rebuilding my system!!!
you save my life
thank you soooo much
Awesome! Number 2 worked. Spent a couple hours working on this issue. Server would hang at the ACPItabl.dat and restart. I pulled one of the drives out and the server came up in windows. Very strange! I have an Intel Raid SRCS16 SATA adapter with Windows 2003 server. Great job!
You Da Man!! Quick fix. Saved my bacon. Thanx muchly.
One good thing to try right off the bat is to go to Last Known Good Configuration. It certainly saved me.
I ran into this and it turned out my W2K3 server wouldn’t boot with the fiber plugged in. The whole reason I rebooted was related to the fiber, so I don’t know why I didn’t check that first. Something to try though if you’re stuck and you have an HBA card.
Eres un chingonazo,
Totally saved my ass- thanks for this.
A little late, but I just had this caused by a NIC driver update failure. Booting in with the last known config, and reinstalling the driver worked perfectly.
Many thanks for the solution. We couldn’t boot the server past the welcome screen following a power cut. Safe Mode with prompt worked occasionally. Errors were fond and fixed with ChkDsk but still no joy. Couldn’t restore to last known and couldn’t repair from the setup disk. I was resigning myself to reinstallation when I found this. After unplugging one of the Raid disks the server started normally and we are up and running within 10 minutes. Once again, many thanks.
Follow on..
Moral of the story – put your servers on UPS!
Genius! mine was combined problem had to do with dust and high temps (my client refuses to install air conditioning all these years in server room), CPU had stuck on the fan, and at the same time stuck on raid 1. Thanks my friend worked at the first boot like sugar. I know finish chkdsk . I spent more than 2 hours thinking of the mainboard (5 years old xeon server) the raid. I had lost hope. Thanks my friend. Greetings from sunny Athens, Greece
Have 2 systems. followed advice. none worked. last thing i tried was putting hd (sata) that only boots to splash screen and stops at safe mode acpitbl into the twin other system that works with another sata w2003 drive in it. still sticks on that system too.
HELP!
It has happened to me after updating BIOS on Dell 2900. After reboot I had same issue.
I’ve removed all SCSI card which I had (3 in total), apart of main Dell card.
Then I’ve started system and it was fine.
I’ve then put them in one by one and found that one card was causing those issues.
SAVED MY BUTT!! changed cmos battery, and hung at acpitabl.dat….pulled a drive, booted to windows (slowly, but it did it) opened the managment utility, showed degraded, plugged it back in, and rebuilding now! Thanks a ton for this, saved me an all night rebuild!
Saved my butt and my neck too. Thanks a million.
20 year veteran, Have been recovering servers across the globe.
This was a very nice find, you saved a lot of us.
I changed bios power management to user defined, still blue screened, I removed 3rd disk, raid yelled no boot volume, shutoff, put disk 3 back in, booted up fine. And rebooted fine!
Just want to thank you for the importance of this tip. If you could only imagine! If you are down this side of the country will definitely treat you to some frosty cold ones. Which reminds me, I am heading to have some cold ones…
Thanks again.
Gorillaz
cheers mate!
I do all this it’s don’t work for me any other idea?
I’m waiting for you. thanks
What’s your hardware specs? Any recent changes to the server?
I had this problem and tried every solution above mentioned and noting worked. So i disconnected all devices one by one and tried to start windows. When i took off the network card it started correctly. I put a new network card and everything worked right.
Seems like this problem could be caused by any faulty hardware.
Thanks for the great post. One of the great things about the Internet. We had a 2003 server come in, based on an old P4 mb (yeah, that old). Thing wouldn’t come up at first. Had to copy ntldr to one of the two mirrored drives. After that, we could get it to boot just to the Windows Splash screen whereupon it would promptly reboot. Thanks to all of your readership, I tried swapping out as many parts as I could. No go. So I simply moved the drive to another P4 system. Up she came. With a couple of driver additions, I’ll be back in the saddle again. Kudos, buddy!