Posted by: tradeaccepted

Hello,

I have successfully installed windows on a DO droplet and have been using it for 3-4 months now. When I installed CC Cleaner to take care of temp files, I accidentally installed bloatware.

This bloatware(Avast Antivirus) cannot be removed in anything but safe mode. ( https://www.avast.com/uninstall-utility ).
I chose "Safe Mode boot" in msconfig, and when I restarted my droplet It is in a constant boot loop.

The windows logo shows and it says "Getting Devices Ready". Then the server reboots back to the windows logo. A screen flashes very quickly that says this:

""""""""""""""""""""
SeaBIOS (version upstream/1.10.2-2-g676197a-dirty-20170515_230010-59f06797a523-0
digitalocean~git+676197a
Machine UUID 3f958aa2-a2a0-4643-985c-f2cc2861bd5a

iPXE ( http://ipxe.org ) 00:03.0 C980 PCI2.10 PnP PMM+7FF93880+7FEF3880 C980

Booting from Hard Disk...
""""""""""""""""""""

Do you know if its possible for me to get my server back and running? Or is it possible to just get the files from my server somehow and then I can reinstall? I don't mind rebuilding my environment but I would like to try to get the files that have changed since my last backup.

Any insight into this is greatly appreciated.

Best,
Ryan

Vendor: Digital Ocean
Vendor Service Package: 2 GB / 40 GB Disk / NYC1 - Ubuntu 16.10 x64
Physical or Virtual: Cloud/VPS

I am very sorry to hear about your troubles 🙁

I do not have a solution off hand to bring Windows back to an operational state, however you should be able recover you files with minimal effort using DO's rescue ISO. Once you have your Droplet booted the the rescue ISO you will need to mount your VHD using the ntfs-3g (So Linux can "see" NTFS).

I haven't used DO's rescue ISO/environment is quite a while, but it should be pretty straight forward.

mount -t ntfs-3g /dev/vda1 /mnt

Once you have your VHD mounts you can navigate to it via the following command.

cd /mnt

From there you should be looking at your "C:\" drive and can then zip up files and sftp/ftp them to another location.

apt-get update
apt-get install zip
zip -r /mnt/myfiles myfiles.zip
ftp 127.0.0.1
put myfiles.zip

Should you run into issues, please feel free to reply here, but PLEASE provide screenshots of your errors/troubles, never too many screenshots 🙂

Good luck!