Well… today I had a power outage at my house, and my Hyper-V lab was shut down abruptly. When I brought the computer up again my hosts had crashed, and my domain controller was stuck in a rebooting loop with this:
Your PC ran into a problem and needs to restart. We’re just collecting some error info, and then we’ll restart for you. (0% complete). If you’d like to know more, you can search online later for this error: 0xc00002e2)
Ouch…. this isn’t good, as this is my only domain controller in the lab currently and I deleted my VM snapshots when troubleshooting a previous issue (d’oh).
As expected, the computer reboots and launches the new 2012 recovery console. It gives me usual options for safe mode & command prompt as well as system restore… I don’t have any system restores, and launching the command prompt and selecting sfc /scannow does little to help.
I started looking at the VM config in Hyper-V Manager, checking the RAM & CPU values, the IDE controller settings are normal (but I detached the ISO I had mounted to the DVD drive just to be safe). Everything else looks fine….
Then I noticed that the SCSI controller option has a hard disk listed, with no VHD mounted. I was playing around with this a week or so ago & hadn’t realised that I’d left this setting applied.
So I shut down the host, removed the SCSI config, hit the start button and crossed my fingers…. and now it’s back in action. A quick snapshot because hindsight is 20/20, and it’s goodnight from me. Tomorrow I’m building a second DC…
By RchGrav (@RchGrav) December 31, 2012 - 5:01 AM
Same EXACT thing just happened to me in my lab.. Power transformer up the street went KABOOM.. When my system came back, it had the VHD attached to an IDE, and then a lone SCSI controller without anything attached. I have a feeling this was caused by 2012 trying to repair itself.. and maybe flipping the SCSI and IDE controllers causing some kind of BCD error. I haven’t found the trick to fix it yet, but I thought I would reply to let you know you aren’t alone.. So far I just removed the SCSI controller with nothing attached to it… but unfortunately its still in the repair loop. (*Gonna remove all virtual controllers and rebuild that part of the VM config and cross my fingers…)
By RchGrav (@RchGrav) December 31, 2012 - 5:02 AM
I’ll will add that it was also my DC, and my 2 other 2012 VM’s and also a 8 Enterprise machine came back without incident.
By RchGrav (@RchGrav) December 31, 2012 - 6:46 AM
UPDATE: I fixed my issue by performing AD Repairs in DSRM, Steps as follows: Boot into DSRM, ntdsutil file integrity, ntdsutil semantic database analysis & fixup, AD Offline Defrag, FIXED! Please refer to “Article ID: 258062 Directory Services cannot start” @ http://support.microsoft.com/?id=258062 (AD Recovery for 2012 has not changed significantly since it was introduced and still uses the same utilities and techniques as what was required for AD Recovery for 2000.)
By Nick December 31, 2012 - 2:59 PM
Thank you for taking the time to post, I’m glad you’ve found a solution – well done!
By Trevor Eaton June 9, 2013 - 1:39 AM
mine was a 100% full WSUS deployment occupying all drive space – booted to command prompt from the dvd iso, switched to system drive (D: in my case from booting from dvd) and went to d:\wsus\ and issued the command rmdir /S wsuscontent. That fixed the boot problem, then I reconfigured WSUS to not be so “download happy” (ie drivers etc, and just stuck with critical updates)
By Rory September 13, 2013 - 2:29 AM
AD Repairs worked for me too.
By Michael Pollard June 12, 2014 - 3:25 AM
I found a better/simpler solution that usually works.
– Boot into Directory Services Repair Mode (Troubleshoot / Startup Settings / Restart / Directory Services Repair Mode). It may do some repairs and reboot, requiring you to do this a second time.
– Login with a local admin account, since AD is not available.
– Delete (or rename) C:\Windows\NTDS\*.log.
And reboot normally.
However, you may also want to defrag the database, while in DSRM:
– Open a Command Prompt (Win-R, CMD, Enter). Type NTDSUTIL and press Enter.
Type “activate instance ntds” and press Enter.
Type “Files” and press Enter.
Type “Info” and press Enter. Verify the folder is actually C:\Windows\NTDS.
Type “Compact to ” and press Enter. I created C:\Windows\NTDS\Temp and used that.
Copy the new file Ntds.dit in the temp folder over top of the old one in NTDS, and delete all the *.log files.
Reboot normally.
References:
http://www.symantec.com/business/support//index?page=content&pmv=print&impressions=&viewlocale=&id=TECH205836
http://support.microsoft.com/?id=258062
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/232122
By Lunar Fantasy January 21, 2015 - 3:03 AM
I had the same issue on my lab 2012R2 DC. Michael Pollard’s instructions got my server running again.
Thanks a lot for all of you!
By Christi De Vos March 18, 2015 - 4:56 PM
Thank you i still had a problem restarting following Michael Pollard steps I continued to get a blue screen, run the following command in Directory Services Restore Mode, and then reboot:
esentutl /p “c:\windows\ntds\ntds.dit”
Hope it helps anyone else thank you for all your help