Posts tagged config

Last night we lost our Openfiler SAN with a “kernel panic” stop message and all virtual machines located on the VMWare ESX cluster were frozen. After I found the problem and I reboot the SAN box;  I than encountered another problem on one of our development SQL server.  Just after the POST phase a black screen was shown and boot process stopped. I did not create any screenshot of this window but it was something like:

Windows  Server could not start because the following file is missing or corrupt: \WINDOWS\SYSTEM32\CONFIG\SYSTEM

Last time I had this error I was not able to fix this problem without reinstalling the OS. No recent backup of this VM and I run out of my options  to get this VM up and running again.

What I did than:

• Shutdown the VM
• Shutdown another working VM
• Mount the virtual disk of the failed Windows installation on the second VM and boot.
• After Windows was boot of the second vm I assigned a disk letter of the failed Windows instllation.

I went to E:\Windows\System32\config and got the following error message.

\Windows\System32\config is not accessible. The file or directory is corrupted and unreadable.

I than right clicked on the volume; went to properties and opened tools tab. I clicked “check now” to repair the volume. After 9% I got warning volume and the process stopped.  I was lost again. But than I remembered one tool which I tried than.

chkdsk e: /f

After the process and check & fix were finished I was able to access all folders. I than shutdown the VM disconnected the virtual disk and boot the development SQL server. After 5 minutes the machine was up and running. This saved me at least couple of days of work to restore the configuration and make everything working.

Windows showed me the warning ” Windows-Registery Hive Recovered”. I was again being able to logon on the server and make sure proper backup was in place now. Same can be done with physical disk but make sure you install the HDD into another machine!