Windows server R2 no disk changes saved after restart..

D

[Dennis

Hello all!

I had some special issue some time ago.. a server was no longer working, we were unable to login to this Windows 2012 R2 server. After some digging I found that it was no longer trusted by the domain.

We removed the account from AD and removed the machine from the domain. After a reboot, it was joined again.. Disconnected the network, removed from the domain, rebooted, it was joined again. Very strange, I restored the machine from backup (we use Veeam) and the same appeared. Just to this single machine. (It’s one of a few Citrix application servers)


I created some files on the desktop, and after restart the files seems to be disappeared.. I created files on the C:\ drive and after the reboot the files disappeared..



So it seems, (checking event log) a month ago ’something’ happened that made the server get in some sort of freeze and reverts everything on a reboot. Now 30 days later the domain security key is no longer valid that explains why we were unable to login. But I was unable to find the root cause of this weird happening. In the end I took another Citrix server and made a new clone of this one to make things work, as everything else seems to work ok it looked (and I hoped) it was a onetime thing.

But today, for another customer, different network, I have the same happening. I restored a server from backup to make a clone of it. So I boot the server without network to remove it from the domain and sysprep the machine. (Same Veeam server as above)

After a reboot all was the same again.. Must be me, I removed it from the domain and put some files on the C drive, after a reboot it was joined again and the created files were gone..

So I tried:

  • Removing Citrix XenApp VDA 7.12, back after restart
  • Removing Webroot anti virus in safe mode, back after restart
  • Creating Files in safe mode, gone after restart
  • Starting PC in recovery, creating some files, restart in recovery, they are gone

The only thing to get it working again was installing windows again, so this made me thing its not the VMware hypervisor.


I checked the other Citrix servers, they get restarted automatically every day at 3am, and I see on all of these servers in the event log that logs from before the restart till the 25<sup>th</sup> are missing.

I was thinking something of vss shadow copy (we don’t have application aware backups enabled on these machines). So could there be something in Windows locking the disks?

At the moment I have no clue where to look.. What else could it be? Very curious what could of caused this..

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