HELP!! Windows 2003 SP2 crashed!!

[maupen]

Help there!! I have only 1 Win2K3 machine running over an ESX 3.00, with Local Storage and it did an automatic installation of SP2 ( my fault..), after that, I received a lot of error and when I tried to reboot, I'm receiving this beautiful BLUE SCREEN

UNMOUNTABLE_BOOT_VOLUME

STOP: 0x000000ED( 0x8696DAB8,0xC0000185,0x00000000,0x0000000)

I don't have any usable Snapshot.. How I can recover information on Virtual Disk if I'm not able to recover Windows???

Any help, will be appreciated!!!!

Thank you!!

[grasshopper]

First thing to do is make a backup copy of the disk file(s). Then you can perform surgery on a safety copy.

The backups can be made using vmkfstools -i .

If the drives are extremely large, but only partially used, you can aviod copying the blank space by dong a copy with vmkfstools -e.

See the vmkfstools man page for more info (man vmkfstools).

Once you have the copy online, you can also place it in a non-persistent mode while you troubleshoot.

ALso, check the /var/log/vmkernel logs and the vmware.log files in the VMs config file directory for clues.

If you are able to boot the VM (i.e. after changing vSCSI controllers, etc) then you can attempt to remove SP2 from Add Remove.

[jjohnston1127 · Accepted solution]

Create another virtual machine and install your OS, or use an existing virtual machine.

Go to your VM settings for the machine and add a hard disk to it, click "Existing hard disk" and point it to the VMDK file associated to the server you're having issues with.

It should recognize it as an additional hard drive and give you drive access to allow you to copy any files off of the drive you need.

Message was edited by:

jjohnston1127

[maupen]

Thanks!

After I added this Virtual Disk at another VM, used CHKDSK and I was able to see all my info there!