[German]Just a brief blog post for administrators of Windows Server 2012 R2. The current updates (Nov. 2018) may result in a black screen when they are installed. Which update is responsible has not yet been determined.
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German blog reader Martin Feuerstein informed me in a mail about experiences he or his colleagues had just made (thanks for the hint). I simply set the information without comment – maybe it helps one or the other administrator.
Updating two servers ……
Martin wrote: This morning my colleague wanted to install updates on two servers with Windows Server 2012 R2 before our employees started with work. One machine was our Exchange server, the other was our "management" server (where different consoles are installed as well as our Helpdesk/Inventory system).
On the Exchange Server only .NET 3.5 and 4.6/4.7 updates were pending. On the Management Server probably also the monthly "Security and Quality Rollup" was pending. Martin wrote that he can't check that right now, because the system is not running yet.
Blackscreen after reboot
After the installation of the upcoming updates and the restart the machines, there was the Windows logo shown when booting. After that the machine with Windows Server 2012 R2 got hung in a black screen. Martin wrote that the Exchange server is virtualized with VMware ESXi. The management server runs on bare metal (no virtualization). Nevertheless, both have a black screen and the machines no longer boot.
Repair attempts to fix the black screen
According to Martin, the repair of the Exchange Server turned out to be quite difficult: Restoring the backup from the previous day (before the update installation) into a new VM resulted in the black screen again. The (pending) .NET updates were not installed at that time (and would also be untypical for a system that no longer boots – no .NET application running at boot time).
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"The Exchange Server was "repaired" by installing a backup of the folder c:\windows\system32\config (i.e. complete HKLM branch) from a date before the installation of the monthly updates – without taking into account files changed by updates in the meantime. Exchange and other services look good so far, e-mail traffic is running again.
Ongoing investigations
Martin Feuerstein wrote me, that he intend now to compare the registry from this morning (after the update), yesterday evening (from the backup) as well as from the older backup and then test it again on an "unimportant" server (with previous snapshot).
So far they have only installed the updates on a few servers in one site(other potentially affected servers don't (yet) show any problems – but they don't want to restart them at the moment), the rollout for other servers and sites has been stopped.
At this point my thanks to Martin Feuerstein for the description. I've found only similar cases here and here (deleted), but it seems not an identical case. Question: Is anyone else affected by this problem?
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Was there any solution found for this problem? I'm seeing the same thing, after the last update it's taking a few minutes to boot up with a blank screen. It just sits there with no hard disk or CPU activity and then suddenly shoots forwards and logs in.