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What happens if a VM is stuck in a boot loop and never actually boots windows?

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Wednesday, July 8, 2015 10:36 PM

Hi guys,

Trying to learn a little more about those nasty days that come around every so often. With Hyper-V (as we know) we can get out of band management essentially and see POST for the VM and control boot devices/windows start modes. How do I do that with an Azure VM if say a piece of software breaks the Windows install and stops it from booting? Is there a Hyper-V style app that gives us this kind of access?

I'm sure this has been asked before but I couldn't find anything by Googling or searching this forum.

Thanks in advance.

All replies (7)

Thursday, July 9, 2015 5:15 AM âś…Answered | 1 vote

2 options really:

1. restore from backup.

2. download the vhd, fix the problem in your hyper-v environment, upload it back. as you can imagine, takes forever...

3. contact support, they should be able to bring it online.

Thursday, July 9, 2015 4:40 AM

Hi Louds,

Thanks for posting here.

As of now there is no feature for VMConnect capability for console access to the VM as there is with Hyper-V.

The work on this issue is in progress.

And you can also share you views and comment on the link and vote for it.

How can we improve Azure Virtual Machines?

Regards.

Thursday, July 9, 2015 4:50 AM

Thanks for the response. Just for my satisfaction, I'm going to ask this question. I figure I know the answer but please confirm.

We've installed a piece of software, or the serve has been infected with a virus and the system starts to show BSOD and we can't boot in to windows. Do I have the option of using a powershell command to boot the machine in to safe mode? And if safe mode isn't a success, that means we need to most likely restore the entire VM from a backup? 

Thanks.

Thursday, July 9, 2015 9:22 AM

Thanks Benny. 

I'm surprised this hasn't been sorted as this is a very important feature as far I can see. It looks like us early adopters (like the days of BPOS and early 365) will have to put up with this until the platform matures and more features are rolled out. 

Would it work to fire up a VM, install Hyper-V and repair it in the cloud? Then upload it back to Azure and re-create the VM?

As a standard Azure subscription, there's no phone support is there - unless it's paid?

Thursday, July 9, 2015 9:54 AM | 1 vote

if you don't pay for support, they won't help i'm afraid.

you cannot install hyper-v on an Azure VM. on some other platforms you can, but you can't boot the actual VM in it.

i agree that the console access thing should have been resolved a long time ago, it can be very frustration sometimes (as an enterprise subscription, i find myself downloading more VHD's then i want to...)

Thursday, July 9, 2015 9:56 AM

Thanks a lot! Very helpful!

Thursday, July 9, 2015 9:58 AM

one more thing, i'm directing you to a technet wiki page i just posted, i use it to revert back to previous working state using snapshots. in my experience, it only costs the extra delta storage, and it's not much at all:

http://social.technet.microsoft.com/wiki/contents/articles/31495.taking-snapshots-on-a-microsoft-azure-vm-and-restoring-it.aspx

hope you'll find it useful :)