Dear Microsoft,
This question has been asked countless times over the last nearly 5 years, but it STILL has never been answered as to why or how to fix it. See this thread, amongst many others. I chose it because it has the most useful information, and sometimes SOME of the suggestion in it DO actually work. I opened a new thread because that one is so very long and has become hard to follow. I'd like to apologize to everyone for the tone of this post, but the level of frustration (not to mention lack of sleep! :) is taking a major toll on us over the last 5 days.
Unfortunately in this particular case, none of them has worked. The irony here is that we put up a temp server to migrate an old SBS2003 server for our client after migration kept failing, per Dell and Microsoft support escalation teams. Since the failure, the MS technician said he cannot help us, since it is not related to the customer's purchase, but rather to a temporary server. this would be the server that HE requested we build as a bridge to fix this failed migration, at OUR expense. So, after 2 months of failed migrations, we bit the bullet and built a 2012R2 server, patched to current, added WSUS (to fix the fact that HE broke it on 2003 and couldn't fix it) and ported all of the data to it, so it's only being used for storage and WSUS. It ran fine for 2 days. We did an update that required a reboot, and voila'! Now THIS server, like SO many others, has this dreaded error. We've now spent 4 days, countless Google and Bing searches, hundreds of taskills and still here we are.
It has been nearly 5 years a 3 server version since this problem has been reported, and yet not one single thread has any response of any kind from any Microsoft employee that any of us can find anywhere. Microsoft better darn well be ashamed of this kind of response to a SIGNIFICANT issue, but I really do believe, as do many of my counterparts here and everywhere, that MS has CHOSEN to ignore this issue. So, we have decided that we will pursue it once and for all until there is both a formal response and a resolution, not just for us. To that end, my first call was to Microsoft PSS; they absolutely incredulous amount they wanted to charge just to hear our question is far beyond what we can afford; we have spent a lot of man-hours and spent a lot of money already that we will never get back and just cannot afford such an enormous expense. The Dell representative has tried everything to help us but told us today that the only thing he could do was try to escalate within MS and was declined for escalation. He has been terrific, and kudos to Dell for allowing him to spend tremendous hours trying to help, both with the initial problem, and now even with this one.
The migration issue has a plan that we know works (we've had to do it before on "messed up" SBS2003 installs) and we are quite comfortable with it. It just requires an intermediary to hold stuff so the clients can operate while we "fix" it to do the migration properly. And we do understand that we can rebuild THIS server yet again; the time involved in doing so is far to great each time, especially when WSUS is involved, and it MUST be, unfortunately.
This is far from the first server we've experienced this one, and we've had it in 2008, 2008R2, 2012 and 2012R2 to date. From the attached post it appears the same experience for nearly everyone.
This server is an older Intel QX6700 on an Intel Desktop board, 8 GB ram, SSD for boot, 2x1.5tb mirror for data all on the Intel SATA bus. There is absolutely nothing remarkable about this machine; it was intended to house the data for about a week as an intermediary for the migration of their SBS2003 installation, and we have used this same box with many versions of Server (2008, R2, 2012, R2) in the past for testing and for tasks such as this without issue. There is currently NO antivirus of any kind installed on it; this is on purpose.
Thanks to all who have responded in the past and have helped resolve many of these situations; we've re-installed 3 servers over the years because of it, and at our expense, which we just cannot afford. But without your help we would have redone many more, and for that we are truly grateful.
So, after all of that ...........All I am asking for is for someone from MS to actually respond to this post and to get this ball rolling. We just want to get this done for our customer, expeditiously and at a reasonable cost. And we want to know why this has persisted for FIVE YEARS without any formal help.
Please help us. Happy Thanksgiving!
Jeff