This can cause all kinds of problems and is sure to ruin your day. Here are a few of the possible causes:
Windows is not activated.
Did you fire up a trial version and then forget it was a trial? Maybe 180 days ago? You either have to get a licence or rearm the server but if you do nothing your server will restart like clockwork every hour, until you do!
Bad Microsoft update.
Is there a good one? Sorry Microsoft, that’s uncalled for for an outfit that takes such great care in testing its patches!!
Very recently, like yesterday, I had two windows 2012 R2 servers restarting endlessly every ten minutes. Not conducive to chilling. turns out dear old Ms screwed up on one of their updates again:
http://www.edugeek.net/forums/windows-server-2012/226016-server-2012-r2-standard-randomly-restarting.html
In case that page ever goes, it was KB5009624.
The above article tells you how to fix this, basically take away the offending update. There is a patch seemingly but I’m waiting for the next patch Tuesday. Sigh!
Software incompatibility.
You can get some doozies under this heading and they can be a bear to sort out. Maybe your antivirus doesn’t like playing with another system on there. Maybe an app is not designed to run on that server version. sure you can fix it yourself, but I’d say “better call that bounder the flounder!”
Perhaps you can think of more, but that’s all from this flounder right now.