I have a server with WinSrv 2016 DC installed for Hyper-V virtualization purposes.
After graceful shutdown purposed for testing the UPS, three VMs won't start. The Hyper-V manager shows that the VM's are in "saved" state. They won't power on, kicking off an error. The "details" of the error message show only the GUID of the errored VM. The same happens if I try to delete the savestate from GUI or powershell.
I delved into the folders of VM's, and encountered no .bin or .vsv files. A serverwide search alsy yielded no results.
The server has adequate amount of RAM and FS to run even the smallest of the stuck VMs.
Are there any ways to restore these VMs?
EDIT: The event log raises these codes: 14026, 20864, 20924, 15160. No further info given. Similar situation: https://www.petri.com/forums/forum/virtualization/microsoft-hyper-v-technology/514257-cannot-export-hyper-v-vm-and-no-real-info
Also, both VMs have snapshots.
Best Answer
To start with... I'm not sure if the problem you are having is going to match what I just went through. I have a single node hypervisor with multiple VMs. I swapped out the storage system the VMs were living on and in doing so I just shut down and moved my VMs over to the new storage and mapped the storage with the same drive designators thinking everything would be peachy. I ended up in a similar situation where I found myself with VMs that were stuck in a "saved" state and would not start, would not import, would not clear state. Needless to say it resulted in a great deal of panic and frustration.
At any rate... After tinkering around for several hours, it came to my attention that in the folder where the VM configuration files are located, I only had VMCX files and no VMRS files. Apparently, the program I used to copy files over thought that these were temporary files that were not worth moving or something (which they kind of are). But, this is what was apparently preventing me from clearing the state of the VM.
Now... I'm not going to say that this is proper... I'm just going to say that it worked for me... I simply took a VM from another machine that I had turned off with a very small VMRS file and copied it then renamed it to match the file name of the VMCX files. At that point, I was able to clear the state of the VM. But... There was still one catch 22... Apparently that file has something to do with the boot order of the machine because when I went into the settings for the VM, the only option was boot from file. None of the other devices were listed as available options. All I wanted to do was boot from the hard drive... I could care less about the rest. So, I had to remove the hard drive, apply the change, add the hard drive back in, apply the change again, and then I was able to select boot option for the hard drive.
I've only figured this all out and restored my VMs about 2 hours ago... and so far I've not had any issues with the VMs that I've restored with this method. I'm sure some Microsoft Expert will po-po all over me for this method... and I would love to know of a better way to do this as I'm sure there is one (or should be anyway). So, use this at your discretion.