I have been having trouble with on of my Unraid Windows VMs. I usually have this running 24/7 and access it via Parsec, which has been fine for years. But yesterday couldn't access it suddenly.

 

I disabled the gpu acceleration and then when viewing it via VNC, I get the Windows BSOD with the error message "windows unmountable boot volume".

 

Have tried passing through a USB thumbdrive with Windows install media to try to do a repair, as I would do with a standalone Windows install, but the VM doesn't seem to register it.

 

Don't want to delete the VM and start again, mostly as I run a game server on the VM and it isn't backed up (yes, not the smartest move). Any advice on how to recover this?

 

Thanks

You could create a new VM with a fresh Windows install and then add the problem drive as an additional one to that VM which you can then run a repair on.

I'll give it a try, thanks

@itimpi any advice on how to point the repair at the right img? Tried as you suggested, but when I got to the cmd prompt in the Windows repair I couldn't run any commands to initiate the repair?

 

Sorry if this is bit beyond Unraid but kicking myself for not backing things up properly.

3 hours ago, Potterus said:

@itimpi any advice on how to point the repair at the right img? Tried as you suggested, but when I got to the cmd prompt in the Windows repair I couldn't run any commands to initiate the repair?

 

Sorry if this is bit beyond Unraid but kicking myself for not backing things up properly.

Not sure if I understand the problem.   You first create a new Windows VM using its own vdisk and make sure that it can boot into Windows.   Having done that you shutdown that VM and edit it settings to add the problem vidsk (or physical disk) as an extra drive in that Windows VM and when it boots that additional drive will now probably show up as drive D:. which you can work on from the Windows level.

24 minutes ago, itimpi said:

Not sure if I understand the problem.   You first create a new Windows VM using its own vdisk and make sure that it can boot into Windows.   Having done that you shutdown that VM and edit it settings to add the problem vidsk (or physical disk) as an extra drive in that Windows VM and when it boots that additional drive will now probably show up as drive D:. which you can work on from the Windows level.

So I tried that earlier today but the problem vdisk wouldn't appear as a drive. Will give it another try when I can as it is likely I needed to do a couple of steps to get it to appear

11 minutes ago, Potterus said:

So I tried that earlier today but the problem vdisk wouldn't appear as a drive. Will give it another try when I can as it is likely I needed to do a couple of steps to get it to appear

Did it not even show up in Disk Manager?   If not then I suspect the vdisk file is badly corrupted.

1 minute ago, itimpi said:

Did it not even show up in Disk Manager?   If not then I suspect the vdisk file is badly corrupted.

 

I'm hoping that isn't the case but we'll see. I appreciate the responses

this is not normal, we don't have to do that, this is an os issue software (not windows)

Edited April 5, 20251 yr by ibasaw

Just to follow up on this in case anyone stumbles on it in the future - the Windows install was dead and I wasn't able to recover it. Not an Unraid issue but I suspect not shutting down the VM properly from within Windows when doing server restarts or shut downs likely sealed it's fate.

 

Lesson learnt - keep backups!