System Hangs at Splash Screen or Boot freezes on ACPITABL.DAT

Often we have seen operating system hanging at Splash screen as seen in the screenshot below.

For Windows Server 2003: 

For Windows Server 2008 and above: 

 

As the first troubleshooting step, you would like to boot into safemode and you would notice operating system hangs at acpitabl.dat. See image below: 

Unplug any external Devices or Storage connected to Server (for example: SAN cable Plugged in to HBA Ports) and then try boot the operating system in normal mode. 

Operating system should come up fine and now we can plug back devices or cables one at a time and reboot to find the root cause. If the server does not boot unplugging the cables or removing the devices, we can boot into Recovery Console or WinRE and initiate a CHKDSK on system drive. 

For windows Server 2003 run the following command: 

C:\>Chkdsk /r C: 

For windows Server 2008 run the following command: 

C:\> Chkdsk /f C: 

Once the CHKDSK completes without any errors, boot the machine in normal mode. 

More Information: In most scenarios, we have seen one or more to be the root cause; 

1.       BIOS/Firmware out of date.

2.       SAN Configuration issues.

3.       Multipath not configured correctly.

4.       Outdated Storage/ FC drivers.

5.       File system corruption.