I've painted myself into a corner. I've just installed Service Pack 1 on a Windows 2008 R2 server that is hosted in a remote datacentre with no possibility of logging in with a 'real' screen and keyboard. SP1 seems to have broken Remote Desktop protocol (RDP), I get to the log-in screen, log in and briefly see the Welcome message, then the RDP session is terminated like so:
The service provider (OVH) has a virtual KVM thingy that is supposed to help out in this situation, but the server blue-screens when booting into that mode (it is some sort of virtual environment apparently). OVH engineers say that vKVM isn't supported for 2008 servers, so that tool is useless... almost. The one ray of hope is that I am able to boot the server into safe mode using vKVM and it doesn't blue-screen, but:
- I can't uninstall the service pack because the server manager doesn't run in safe mode
- I can't install VNC because Windows Installer doesn't run in safe mode
- I can't install updates because Windows Update doesn't run in safe mode (anecdotal evidence suggests that installing further updates would have solved this issue).
There isn't a full system backup of this server because the backup system is based on FTP and it just wasn't feasible, so I can't simply restore from backup. All of the important data is backed up, however. So I have the option to rebuild the server from scratch, I'd really hope to avoid that though as the down time is undesirable.
Any suggestions on how I can paint myself back out of this corner without a full reinstall? e.g. is there some remote access software that can be installed in safe mode? Is there a known fix for RDP? Is there a way to roll back a service pack from safe mode?