Sometimes I find that one of my Windows VMs isn’t pinging the morning after I have released security updates. I have a look at the console of the VM and it looks like this:
What causes Windows to boot into the Recovery Environment? It happens if the previous boot failed. You actually get a boot menu before this, which looks like the following:
As you can see, the Launch Startup Repair option is the default, and thus you end up with the server (or PC) not booting properly. If you follow through the repair process Windows can do a rollback to a system recovery point prior to when the machine was joined to your domain, which is fun. That’s less likely on servers than PCs, but it’s annoying that the server sits at the recovery screen. Invariably when I click Cancel and reboot the server it boots up fine, thus I am going to disable this functionality by issuing the following command on all my servers (and possibly go on to do all the PCs too):
reagentc /disable
Now they’ll just complain that they failed to boot but retry a normal boot:
Note that the reagent.exe utility is only available on Windows Server 2008 R2 and higher.
