For reasons I have not yet had time to diagnose, a number of Windows 7 VMs running on our ESX 4.1 cluster are failing to startup properly after rebooting. The VMs stop at the Windows 7 Recovery Console until someone opens a vSphere Client console window on them and clicks past the console to a reboot. After reboot, they come up fine.
Since I’ve not had a chance to properly diagnose what’s causing this, a bit of Google searching brought me to the following set of instructions for a temporary workaround:
- In the Windows Start Menu on an affected VM, right-click the Command Prompt icon and choose "Run As Administrator". If necessary, enter administrator credentials. A command prompt window should appear.
- In the Command Prompt window, enter the following commands:
bcdedit /set {default} recoveryenabled No
bcdedit /set {default} bootstatuspolicy ignoreallfailures - Close the Command Prompt window.
From this point on, the boot process will ignore whatever error has been triggering the Startup Recovery Console. The virtual machine will boot into Windows regardless of the error it is encountering. In my particular situation, setting the above options has eliminated the problem for the Windows 7 VMs. When I have more time, I’ll diagnose and try to actually fix the issue, but for now this workaround is doing the job.