SBS 2003 Reboot Error - The system is not fully installed.

A couple of days ago we could not remote access one of our clients SBS 2003 box we took over from a fairly new client, So we called during the day told him to reboot the system.

About 8:30pm I got a call saying the system has this message on the screen and it reboots to that message and that's it. Sure enough, I went over to his office and there it was.

I could not do anything to the server on site, so I took it back to the shop did some research and found the following KB Article:

.Article ID: 320279 - Last Review: May 19, 2005 - Revision: 4.1

"The system is not fully installed" error message after you run Sysprep and restart

 

Also this site had similar solutions:     techarena forum

 

“Click File , and then select Load Hive .Select the main drive letter from the "Look in:" dropdown field at the top of the Load Hive window. Double-click the SystemSetupInProgress Value Name, a REG_DWORD data type, and set the data value to 0. Exit the Registry Editor.
Use Control Panel / System / Advanced / Startup and Recovery [Settings] to make the Default operating system your original install. You can also alter the time to display the list of operating systems.”

 

I followed the KB article, took out each harddrive  since we were dealing with RAID1 and placed them in our USB dock. I loaded and navigated to the key and changed the 1 to 0. It is possible that Lenovo used sysprep in their install and somehow the reboot wrenched the registry.

Amazingly, the system booted correctly. I rechecked all log files to see of there was any issue related to the error. None were found.

We now pushed his upgrade cycle a bit closer in time. Also we noticed that we have some surprising issues with servers we did not build or we inherited from previous IT companies.