According to my monitoring system, around midnight on Saturday 11 July, a customer's Server 2012R2 went down and did not recover.

On Monday 13 July, I found the server was stuck on the System Recovery main screen with 3 options:

- Continue to Windows 2012R2
- Troubleshoot
- Turn off PC.

Selecting Continue rebooted the system but that only returned to the same screen. Selecting Troubleshoot brought up an Advanced Options screen with 2 options:

- System Image Recovery
- Command Prompt

Selecting System Image Recovery did not find the server 2012R2 installation and requested a System Image Backup. I cancelled that, and returned to the Advanced Options menu.

Selecting Command Prompt dropped me in a terminal, where I used DiskPart to examine the system disk.

The server has 2 disks. Disk 0 is the system disk and has 2 standard windows partitions. Partition 1 is the Recovery system, Partition 2 has the standard Windows installation. Normally, it is expected that partition 1 is not visible and partition 2 is drive C:.

list volume showed that volume 2 containing my Windows install had changed drive letter and had become drive E:

The new drive C: had been assigned (how is unknown) to volume 1 which was labeled System Rese(rved ) and appeared to be the volume on Partition 1 of our Disk 0 (the system drive). Curiously, dir c:\ listed only a single file, empty, named Recovery.txt.

I did a chkdsk on E: that confirmed there was nothing wrong with our system volume.

dir e:\ also had an empty Recovery.txt file as well as the usual directories for a Windows installation.

Next, bootrec /scanos reported successfully scanning for Windows installations and finding none.

sfc /scannow reported there is a system repair pending which requires a reboot to complete. But rebooting does not change anything.

Returning to the Advanced Options menu, I selected Startup Settings. The only option was Restart, so I restarted and was presented with a long list of boot options.

Repair your computer changed nothing.
Last known good configuration changed nothing.
Start Windows normally changed nothing.

Returned to diskpart:

select disk 0
detail disk shows Boot Disk : No.
select partition 1 : drive c - System Reserved has attribute Active: Yes.
select partition 2 : drive e - Windows System has attribute Active: No.

Changed partition 2 attribute Active to Yes. That switched partition 1 Active to No.

Rebooted and this time Windows Boot Manager could not even start System Recovery.

File: \Boot\BCD
Status: 0xc000000f

Boot configuration data for your PC is missing or contains errors.

So, reboot with install CD and return to Terminal.

bootrec /rebuildbcd.

This time it finds the Windows installation on drive c:. Say yes to add it. Reboot. Wait. And back to the same Recovery options.

Select Troubleshoot/System Image Recovery does not find a system image.

Go to a command prompt again:

bootrec /fixboot
bootrec /fixmbr
bootrec /rebuildbcd
Total identified Windows installations: 0

In desperation, I deleted the Recovery.txt files and rebooted. No change. So at this point, I quit and I am now working on mitigating.

I am hoping someone can offer some sort of explanation and a recovery strategy.

Regards

Philippe

Hi,

Thanks for your post.

According to your description, it seems like the issue is that the windows could not recovery through troubleshoot section, right?

When you choose - Command Prompt, such as dir e: the folder "WindowsImageBackup" on the screen did not appear,right?

Did you try to go to the cmd prompt and run

bcdedit /set {default} recoveryenable no

Similar thread has been discussed:

https://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/8540fe90-19bd-4ace-a65e-d6647b784952/stuck-in-a-preparing-automatic-repair-loop?forum=winserver8gen

Regards.

Regards.

Sorry! That made things worse. Now I can't even get the recovery options. The monitor stays black as death not blue as would be appropriate.

I suspected something like that might happen. After all, bootrec /rebuildbdc could not find a Windows installation although bcdedit does list a Windows installation on the current disk. 

Philippe

So! I decided to go ahead and restore from a system backup to a new hard disk. I wanted to preserve the problematic one.

The restore was complete after about 40 minutes and then it rebooted. To what you ask?

"Your PC ran into a problem and needs to restart. We are just collecting some info and then we'll restart for you.

If you'd like to know more, you can search online later for this error: 0xc00002e2"

Restart! Then I'm back to the same recovery options and looping through this screen and the recovery options.

I could wring someone's neck! 

Hi,

Above all please noticed that "bcdedit /set {default} recoveryenable no" Vivian provided is not a solution to this issue. It is for stopping error recovery - the purpose is to see if it could provide more information for troubleshooting.
From the errors and the result of failing to do a recovery, it is more like an operation system issue instead of just a booting issue.

In this situation, perform an in place upgrade could be a quick workaround. Of course if there is an earlier recovery point it is still worth to have a try first.