Last night I lost my Openfiler iSCSI SAN with a “kernel panic” stop message. All virtual machines which were located on that VMWare ESX cluster froze. After I found the problem I reboot the Openfiler machine, and server came back successfully. While checking all virtual machines I encountered another problem with my development MS SQL server.

Just after the POST boot phase a black screen was shown and boot process stopped. Unfortunately I didn’t have any screenshot for this window but it was something like:

Last time I had this situation I was not able to fix this problem without reinstalling the OS. I had no recent backup. I run out of my options to get this virtual machine 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 virtual machine I assigned a disk letter of the failed Windows installation.

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

I 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. Again I was lost and I remembered the chkdsk.exe tool. I run that tool from command line:

chkdsk e: /f

After check disk process has finished I was able to access all folders. I shut down the virtual machine and disconnected the virtual disk, and boot my 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 – Registry 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!