I have a customer with a Server 2011 Essentials server. A week ago they moved it off the UPS (because it was beeping) and plugged it into the wall - and a power spike came along the other day and caused it to bounce - and now it will not boot.
That is, it WILL boot into "start windows repair" and allow you to recover from a backup or open a command prompt, etc. However, when attempting to select System Image Recovery it does not find a system image. This was running Windows Backup and a current backup DOES exist of all the volumes. I don't know why it does not think there's a system image on the backup but it doesn't. Maybe it isn't scanning the backup properly or whatever.
You can ALSO see all of the various drive letters for the various volumes in the server if you go to them at the command prompt and see all the files. chkdsk reports the C: drive is fine, system file checker found a few bad system files and replaced them, etc. etc. It just simply won't boot again.
However in any case, this server was slated to be retired and in fact the customer has a new ProLiant running Server 2016. The backup has all of the files that were shared out and so forth. Because the old domain was setup with a .local extension I was going to blow it away anyway and move all of the workstations over to the new domain and not try migrating all the crufty garbage from the old domain to the new domain. They are storing email at their ISP and access it via IMAP. So while it's a nuisance to unjoin the machines from the old domain and join to a new domain, that was in the cards anyway. This is just hastening things.
The only problem is that they had an antique accounting software package on the old server that they liked to look up data on from time to time. That package will NOT run on windows 10 or server 2016 or anything modern. So the original plan was to keep the old server running just for lookups with 1 workstation left on it.
Anyway I had the following idea, why not take the windows backup and create a Server 2011 Essentials under HyperV and do a volume restore of C: to a virtual disk. So I created the Server 2011 virtual server from the 2011 Essentials install DVD/iso, activated it, etc. I then created a 200GB VHD file, mounted it as drive F: in the hyper image, restored the C: volume from the backup to it, everything is there. c:\windows\ntds and all of it's files, c:\windows\sysvol and so on are all there. I CANNOT just boot it (I tried) because it is expecting a ProLiant array hardware to be there not the virtualized SCSI/IDE hardware that HyperV supplies. But is there any way to Migrate the original C: volume from the backup into HyperV and boot the server?