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My host machine lost power and after reboot the Windows 2008 virtual machine hosted in it, dumps a blue screen on boot. If I try SafeMode, it gets stuck on loading \Windows\system32\drivers\crcdisk.sys - it waits for a few minutes and then bluescreens.

It's a pretty important dev machine and I would love to somehow recover it without wiping it off and reinstalling - there is a bunch of software and will take me a day or more to reinstall everything. Is there a way just to repair corrupted files? I tried install disk and chose "Repair computer" but it only offers to restore from backup, which I don't have :(

Any ideas would be highly appreciated!

  • Andrey
Andrey
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1 Answers1

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You should be able to use an image of the install CD to go to the repair console and from there run chkdsk. If not you could also try running a BartPE repair disk and run chkdsk from that. The Windows install CD should also allow you to run fixmbr and fixboot, if needed, but any repair efforts can possibly end up damaging it completely.

Is the install CD taking you to the restore from backup not letting you go to the repair console at all?

Bart Silverstrim
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  • I already went to repair console, and ran chkdsk- it found no errors. I don't know what to do next. – Andrey Sep 29 '09 at 17:08
  • Also, I don't need to run fixmbr and fixboot - Windows boots fins, it just crashes somewhere along the way while loading drivers – Andrey Sep 29 '09 at 17:09
  • First, I'd back up the image. That way you can get it back to a "known" state even if it doesn't boot. Next I'd try running testdisk from a Linux RIP CD (bootable repair disc) image. That has tools for partition checking and the ability to check the MFT and boot sectors. I have a system right now that was bluescreening during boot and it started booting up after I rebuilt the boot sector with testdisk. I've had other systems that start booting and died until I ran fixboot on them. Takes a moment and doesn't hurt if you already have the image backed up to start over. – Bart Silverstrim Sep 29 '09 at 17:13
  • OK. I'll try. Thanks for the advice, I'll let you know if that helped – Andrey Sep 29 '09 at 17:16
  • So.... I ran Botrec /fixmbr and Boootrec /fixboot, and now I get blue screen even faster :) Any way I could just reinstall Windows 2008 while keeping all installed programs? I think I could do that back in Win 98 days, not sure if it works now. That's my first Win Server crash in over 5 years - I run tons of Win 2003 and 2008 VM's and never had any blue screens yet... – Andrey Sep 29 '09 at 17:48
  • You should be able to, but I haven't tried it. You might still be able to try the Rescue Is Possible iso image to run testdisk and see if that can help...nothing to lose, really. If you backed up the image first, restore it, then try the boot repair with just fixboot and not fixmbr, and you can still try testdisk. – Bart Silverstrim Sep 30 '09 at 11:47