Royally messed up the Windows Server 2008 R2

windows-server-2008-r2

I did a Disk Cleanup on my Server 2008 R2. It said it was going to delete a bunch of windows update files which had built up over many updates. When I restarted, windows tried configuring an update before launching (the grey screen with a % update tracker) but got stuck.

I cant launch in safe mode, it just tries to update anyways and gets stuck.

I tried using repair disk Cmd prompt to delete pending.xml but there was no windows installation on C drive (huh????)

With a little poking around and using the explorer on the repair disk, it turns out that my system has moved to drive G, and C drive is now called "System Reserved" and has just a boot folder and a couple of other almost empty folders.

My theory is that this is what Windows does when configuring updates, it temporarily creates a new partition, renames it to C: (while renaming the system partition to G:) so that it can configure or something. Unfortunately, because Disk Cleanup deleted some files it wasnt supposed to, Windows thinks its supposed to update but for some reason cant, maybe because something is corrupt or it is missing files or something.

So… how do I reverse this? I did make a backup of my C drive about a month ago. But I would rather try to preserve my changes since then. Anyone know if I can cancel this partition split? Either delete C and force a boot from G or somehow make G into C again? Anyone have any experience with this? Lol… PLZ HALP! 🙂

My guess is I will need to delete the boot folder in the "System Reserved" partition and rebuild a boot folder in my system partition. Can anyone confirm if this is what I should be looking into?

Best Answer

  1. Disk Cleanup can take 1 to 4 hours. It's NORMAL to sit at 100% Configuring updates after rebooting. If you can't wait that long, don't run Disk Cleanup.
  2. You should always have a current backup image of your server so you can easily recover if necessary. We use Macrium Reflect Server.