Troubleshooting Windows Server Boot Problem

The other day at a customer I had the following problem

One of their physical machines had a problem starting. When trying to boot it went straight to System Recovery Options… not good

I tried all of the alternatives such as Safe boot, Last known good etc to get it to boot… no such luck :-)

After some research I found the tip to rebuild the  boot records using bootrec /rebuildbcd. When I tried this I got the following information:

Scanning all disks for Windows installations. Please wait, since this may take a while... Successfully scanned Windows installations. Total identified Windows installations: 0 The operation completed successfully.

So the solution here was to remove the BCD store and then rebuild it like this...

First we back up the BCD Store:

bcdedit /export c:\bcdbackup

Then we need to change change attributes on bcd folder in order to change it

attrib c:\boot\bcd -h -r -s

... and then we rename the bcd store to be able to replace it

ren c:\boot\bcd bcd.old

... and last but not least we recreate it

bootrec /rebuildbcd

Hopefully everything is ok and we get something like this:

Successfully scanned Windows installations. Total identified Windows installations: 1 [1] C:\Windows Add installation to boot list? Yes<Y>/No<N>/All<A>:

Which we respond Yes to and then reboot the computer

Links

http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/windows8_1-windows_install/total-identified-windows-installations-0/52359f87-de4a-41dc-b0c3-cc275e1d9fbf https://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/01acc1c7-cea6-429d-91ac-9159f3e7d855/windows-server-2008-r2-boots-into-system-recovery-options-after-system-power-offon?forum=winservergen