Hi there!
Last week I faced a problem with black screen on server. After I logged on to win 2012R2 server through RDP I got the black screen and that is all I could do. Let’s talk about server configuration:
- Windows 2012R2 with all patches installed, maybe missing some for last month
- Hosted on vmware ESX 5.1
- Server role is file server
- 8Gb RAM, 1 vCPU, some SAN disks
You know, it happens quite often when you got black screen, normally you need just to force logoff or restart the server.
Logoff was not helpful in my case, so I asked for a service window to restart the server. As you might guess, restart was not helpful at all.
The first article in google for “windows 2012R2 black screen” show us KB2897632 . It was not 100% my case, as I was able to launch CTRL+ALT+DEL. However, I decided to try. I downloaded msu file of KB2887595 and using tried to install it from remote server.
Psexec \\fileserver1 cmd /c “wusa C:\KB2887595v2.msu /quiet /forcerestart”
I got access denied error so had to add –s key to psexec command so it execute as administrator on remote server.
Psexec \\fileserver1 –s cmd /c “wusa C:\KB2887595v2.msu /quiet /forcerestart”
This time I got message that this update was already installed. As the file I downloaded was v2, that usually means that this update should replace previous I uninstalled KB2887595 and installed it again manually.
Psexec \\fileserver1 –s cmd /c “wusa /uninstall /KB 2887595”
Problem was still there. I tried to connect to server using vmware console with same “black screen” result. So after all I decided to blame vmware and reinstall vmware tools. I’m not vmware expert, so I decided to compare different VMs with problematic one. From what I was able to find is that my VM has only 4Mb of video card memory, while other have 8Mb at least. So maybe it has not enough performance to handle display? I added 28Mb more, same result.
There was nothing in windows logs about my problem. From device manager I could see that Monitor was listed with warning along with VMware VMCI Bus Device. I tried to completely uninstall vmware tools and install the latest version. Still no luck.
I started to search on google again. There were no results from MS forums at all, just some sites I do not trust so much. One small comment somewhere stated that it was about missing domain users in local Users group.
I checked that and…bingo my domain profile was created on local computer and I was able to log in fine!
skilledteam 