recover a windows 2008 R2 Xen 5.6 virtual machine --- my Friday rescue series continues
well, not this Firday, its last Friday night...
got a call from co-worker and management off-course , that a fileserver ( PDC as well) has reboot and crashed to bluescreen in a cycle.
by looking at the bluescreen code ( I will post the code later here), one possibilty is the drive letter not be assigned in reg. I booted the windows 2008 R2 server into repair mode, not much help.
tried LKG, tried disabled signed-driver, no luck.
another thing is to check runonce... I didn't try this
in despair, I found a copy of reg back files one week ago, and I make a copy of current ones, and copy the backup ones over, namely they are SOFTWARE /, SYSTEM etc
the location is windows\system32\regback
then miracle happened, the server started ...
a few points need noting: 1/ need windows 2008 R2 ISO, luckily , another co-work made it available during the server initial install
2/ local admin password: I guess this out as it is this company's often used one. this is the domain administrator password, i dont think it is the DSRM password. I never tried AD recovery. as the result proved it is reg corrupted.
I need the local admin passowrd to boot the ill-fated VM to repair mode even if it is a PDC.
3/ I performed this remotely via a XEN console , co-work started teamviewer on the XEN console client PC ( W7)
previously I dont think PC system generated reg files are useful as they tend to be old reg when the PC was new.
this time, the system generated reg backup is 1 week old.
