After VM Reboot - VM not showing in Host, Orphaned in vCenter

[tamz273]

Hello All,

I had a Server 2k8 running as an IIS server.  While using it last night, it hung on me and I couldnt restart it.  I went into vCenter and restarted from there, and the VM seemed to shutdown ok, but it would not come back up.  I tried to start it up but got an error.  Then went into ESX host and the VM was no longer available on the Host level, and on the vCenter it was showing as orphaned.

I did some reading online, and followed a guide that told me to remove the orphaned VM and re-add the VMDK as a new VM.  Following those steps, my VM now boots past the BIOS screen, and starts loading windows then get a quick split second BSOD, then the VM restarts and gives me the option to:

-Start windows normally

-Windows Recovery Startup

If I start normally, it loops in the same cycle, if I do a Recovery Startup, it gives me the normal windows recovery tools.  In the diskpart tool, I can see the disk fine along with the partitions.

Can someone stear me in the right direction? My guess is that something in the VM files is corrupt, causing windows to back out of its boot process due to a hardware issue..?

I attached some logs too.  Thanks for any advice!

[jrmunday · Accepted solution]

If this is the only VM affected, then it is probably OS corruption. You can either deploy a new VM and migrate the data off the existing disks onto the new one (simply mount the VMDK's on the new VM) or go to the effort of diagnosing and repairing the system.

If you're going to do the later, then start off with identifying the BSOD stop error - is is a 7B error? (please post a screen shot). Can you boot into safe mode? If you can, then it would be worth ensureing that kernel dumps are configured so that you can run the .DMP file through WinDbg to debug the stop error ... this will give you information on what driver etc is causing the crash dump.

Cheers,

Jon

[tamz273]

Thanks Jon.  After fiddling around some more last night, I was able to boot back to "Last Known Good Configuration" and it came right up.  Not sure what caused it, but I've definitely learned to take Snapshots now

Thanks for the reply!