Today, when I rebooted my Windows 8.1 instance (running under VMware Fusion 7 Pro), I was greeted by the "Preparing Automatic Repair" during boot. I keep backups of my VMware instances so I could easily restore the instance from backup - and all my source code is also kept in remote git repositories. But, I wanted to test if I could salvage this instance, and maybe learning something in the process.
Say hello to: Preparing Automatic Repair
I tried the various options presented but could not get out of "Preparing Automatic Repair";
on every reboot it would enter this state.
In addition, when I tried to do a repair, I was notified that I had to little space left (3.4 GB left).
First, I tried to remove some unnecessary user produced files, by dropping into the command console and deleting them, but even 6GB free space was not enough. So, instead I decided to increase the VMware disk size for this instance by about 20GB. This allowed repair to start.
However, when I tried to complete a "fresh repair", it failed right after 1%.
So, I rebooted, and then through the Advanced options dropped into the command console, and ran these commands:
I also disabled "Automatic Repair",
When I next rebooted, I was greeted by this message during boot:
Boot critical file is corrupt: C:\Windows\system32\drivers\intelide.sys
I choose once again to run Repair,
and this time it completed.
All installed applications, such as Visual Studio, were gone, but my user data/source code was still there.
Next up, restore my VMware instance backup.
