Black Screen of Death when restoring SBS 2011

Here at Focused IT we regularly test our clients backup by performing a bare metal restore to dedicated hardware every three months to ensure it’s going to be okay in the event of a disaster.

Whilst this was working for most of our clients there were a couple which booted in to a black screen with cursor. The machines were operative at a very basic level as we could access them remotly via RPC, but most services weren’t started and the event log couldn’t have had many more errors.

We’d tried various options to get these going but couldn’t spot what was different between clients that worked and clients that didn’t. So when we stumbled upon the following article we were very hopeful: http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/smallbusinessserver/thread/be28b0a1-9cad-45aa-ad4c-b9e85e3128d2/. Thankfully it solved our issues so in the future we’ll be sure to uninstall the Windows NT Backup Restore Utility (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/974674) right after we’ve finished with it to ensure that we can sleep at night knowing our clients backups are good.