Today while running Windows Updates on our non-essential systems during the day time I had my 4th VM fail to boot. It's just a blue screen with no error codes or anything. It's got a QR code on the screen for about 10 seconds before it reboots. The QR code on the screen takes me to windows.com/stopcode and it tells me nothing useful. Choosing to boot into safe mode has the same result of getting a blue screen with QR code.
This problem has occurred on Windows 2012 and 2016 Hypervisor. It's occurred on a SAN and on a VM that was saved to a local hard drive. Across the past year out of the 4 VM's that have failed they've been on 3 different servers. In todays case I lost a Windows 2016 server running Syslog and FTP on a Windows 2016 Hypervisor. The VM did very little and is less than a year old.
I attempted to use WinPE to rebuild the boot sector and instead of a blue screen got a warning there was no OS installed on the drive specified. I've got another guy in the office who's doing some testing and he can mount the VHDX file as a secondary HD to view its contents. So the VM doesn't appear to be corrupted, and the boot sector it fine. The issue is during the beginning of the windows boot process.
Has anyone run into this before and found a way to repair the busted VM's? We do our Windows Updates quarterly so it's only ever during updates that we notice this problem. If we restore a backed up VM it will have the same problem. Once we go back through a month of backups and find the VM is busted we just move on and rebuild it from scratch.
