Remote Desktop Blank Screen and Solution

  • Thread starter Thread starter spunwicked
  • 4 comments
  • 14,097 views

spunwicked

7th Day Advent Hoppist
Premium
Messages
1,105
United Kingdom
Bakewell UK
Messages
dunkrez
Messages
spunwicked
Fixing black screen after logging on via remote desktop for Windows Server 2003

A few a days ago I was delivering a full day of training to a client of mine, and I made the mistake of leaving a remote desktop connection to my Windows 2003 server logged on (as admin). This would usually present no issues but in this instance it caused a bit of a headache.

At lunchtime, I went to log on to my server via remote desktop and after logging on I got a blank black screen. You can imagine my heart pounding at this point. Was my server about to die? I took precautions and checked all services were running normally (which they were thank god!) and decided to back everything up from there via FTP there and then. The backup took 3 days, but better safe than sorry.

I trawled the web looking to see if people had had similar issues, and found nothing of value. Luckily I had a secondary admin account set up so I decided to try logging into the server using that. Success!

I opened task manager and went to the 'user' tab and lo and behold, their was admin, still logged on. I logged the original admin account off and logged out of my secondary account.

Then I started a new remote desktop session, logging in as admin and everything worked as it should.

I can sleep easy now! :)
 
Yes indeedy. You could have tried Ctrl+Alt+End which sends Ctrl+Alt+Del to the remote computer.
 
Yes indeedy. You could have tried Ctrl+Alt+End which sends Ctrl+Alt+Del to the remote computer.

Nice tip - will remember that, thanks Dunk 👍

Writing software is enough of a mission without having to keep on top of server admin too. If in doubt, next time I will post my issue here!
 
Your server doesn't have a local scheduled backup running automatically?

Task Manager is not the best place to find another account logged on. Terminal Services manager is where you should be. You can find a list of logged in users, with the login time, idle time, etc. Right-click the one you want to kill and pick Log off. If it happened to be a Citrix server, you would even see whether the session was RDP or ICA.

3 days of FTP?!?!?! Really??!?!?!

Were you training a client on your server with an admin login??!!?!?!

You've got some best-practices reading up to do, I think ....
 
@wfooshee

Scheduled backups running every morning at about 3am, including sites and full DB back ups. I was referring to downloading it all to my development PC.

3 days of FTP for almost 1 million files. Really.

I was training a client on my dev PC (rare one to one training day). I was logged onto my server in the morning and let the session time out. My client and training had nothing to do with being logged onto the server.
 
Last edited:
Back