Score:3

Updated VirtIO SCSI driver on my Windows 2012 R2, and now only boots into recovery. How to recover?

us flag

I have a Hetzner W2012 R2 Cloud VM, and I updated the VirtIO vioscsi driver on it. Now it only boots into recovery mode and I cannot access the C-drive even from command prompt.

Is there any way to save this VM or is it a goner?
I have no (recent) snapshot of it :(

I can mount the old previous VirtIO ISO, but how can I reinstall the old driver when I have no access to the C-drive?

Update 1:
Am able to get access to the C-drive with drvload vioscsci.inf.
Still trying to figure out how to reinstall the old drivers.

Update 2
I used dism /image:e:\ /add-driver /driver:vioscsi.inf to add the driver but it still won't boot.

Update 3
Startup repair gives error 0x490.

No clue what to do next or how to even troubleshoot why it is not booting.

Update 4

It appears all my system drivers have become unsigned. Disabling driver signature enforcement allowed the system to finally boot.

Do not know why this happened. It appears I will have to do a full reinstall, but at least I got back access to the VM now.

us flag
Yes. I also made sure to uninstall all other versions of vioscsi in case it was still loading something incorrectly. Didn't help either.
in flag
Change the VM to use Sata/ahci instead of virtio, add an extra disk device with virtio, hopefully windows starts and you can fix the drivers and verify on new disk, shutdown and restore settings.
us flag
@NiKiZe That might fix it, but as far as I know you can't change the startup parameters on Hetzner Cloud VMs. At least I don't know how to do it.
us flag
Looks like all my drivers became unsigned. I was able to get into the VM by disabling signature enforcement.
us flag
Ok. I will post it as an answer if I can't figure out how to fix the signatures. Still trying to figure out that part, but I may throw in the towel soon.
Score:2
us flag

1: Disable driver signature enforcement

After much investigation, all system drivers had become unsigned. Cause unknown (possibly drive corruption).

To access the VM I needed to boot without driver signature enforcement.
To do that, first activate the boot menu from Windows Recovery:

bcdedit /set {bootmgr} displaybootmenu yes

Then reboot, press F8 and choose to boot without enforcement.

2: Restore missing security catalogs

For some reason all files in

C:\Windows\System32\catroot\{F750E6C3-38EE-11D1-85E5-00C04FC295EE}

...had disappeared. I happened to have a catroot_old folder in System32, so I copied the files from there back into catroot. Using any previous backup would probably have worked too.

This change allowed me to boot normally again.

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