Restless C#ding

I've been trying to restore my development virtual machine in order to test out some apps, and found out the vmware image must have gotten corrupted. So Windows Home Server backs up all my machines, but in this case wouldn't restore all that well -- yielding a no-boot scenario. So after replacing the Home Server Restore disk with the Windows 7 install disk and booting, I expected to just adjust the boot partition location in BOOT.INI, but was surprised to see that had been done away with.

In it's place is a new command line tool "BOOTREC", but there's requirements on it actually being able to poll the active drive paritions ("active" being the key here).

This link shows how to fix the boot partition for Windows 7. Notice the difference between the legacy use of the hidden, system, readonly BOOT.INI with a command line app.

 http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en/w7itproinstall/thread/7791044e-db7f-4144-a96c-945299811f58

Now for me, the initial bootrec command wouldn't let me rebuild the boot configuration, instead giving an "element not found" error. Insead, the DISKPART instructions in the post about setting the active disk partition allowed me to get to an BOOTMGR not found error. 

Now Kevon Walcott's solution didn't work on it's own for me, but was the first step:

Diskpart

LIST DISK

SELECT DISK (followed by the number of the disk . most likely 0)

LIST PARTITION

SELECT PARTITION (followed by your partition number. most likely 0)

ACTIVE

EXIT

Second step was from Vivian Xing [MSFT], and rebuilt the boot config for the drive itself and the boot list:

Bcdboot C:\windows

NOTE: Replace C with the drive letter where the system is installed.

BOOTREC /FIXMBR

BOOTREC /FIXBOOT

BOOTREC /REBUILDBCD

Oh boy is this one fun... so you like having your VMWare images (virtual machines) on a separate hard drive, so they run faster. You have your PC's OS hard drive on different physical hardware than the VMWare image. Here comes the fun part -- you love the portability of being able to move the hard drive from machine to machine, running the virtual machine on both VMWare Workstation and VMWare player. You suspend your VM when you're done for a while, and resume it later on, sometimes on a different PC. You always safely remove your hardware using the windows OS tools, until one fateful day.

You unplug the harddrive thinking you're done, when you get a windows error message: "Delayed Write Failed". Uh oh.

You've just corrupted your saved state. This is because even though vmware said it was done writing the ram out to disk, it really was still writing... this way you could still work in the background!

OK, you think -- as far as the VM is concerned, the RAM is corrupt (or rather the data stored in virtual RAM is corrupt). How can we get this back?

The easy way is to close your vm software of choice (vmware player or workstation), rename your *.vmem file (a file containing the contents of the virtual ram), and start up the virtual machine again.

It will die. You'll get a message saying the vmem file cannot be found, and there's something corrupt with the saved state... do you want to preserve or discard?

You should select "Discard", and then start up the VM again. This time it'll boot up, just like windows crashed (do you want to enter safe mode? no.). You should still have all of your data (assuming nothing was acting on the data in RAM as you were suspending, in which case you can add data loss to your list of accomplishments for the day.