Hyper-V launch aborted due to auto-launch being disabled in the registry.

Over the weekend, I spent some time rejigging the disk structure in my R&D Hyper-V server. I used StorageCraft ShadowProtect to backup the entire server as part of a regular backup process. I installed all the new disks into the server and then proceeded to restore all the partitions.  Because I was not moving it to new server hardware, I did not do a Hardware Independent Restore at all – just a restore and then a reboot as that was all that was needed.

When I restored the server, it booted just fine, but I found that the Hyper-V machines would not start.  Further digging into the situation showed the error below in the System Event Log

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On Windows Server 2008 R2, there is normally a 100MB partition at the start of the 1st physical drive that contains the C: drive. This partition is used to store Boot Configuration Data (BCD) information as well as other critical files. As part of my ShadowProtect backup, I do not backup this partition at all as ShadowProtect cannot restore it.

I did some digging and found that Microsoft have some info on this error here and it tracks back to the fact that I no longer have the original 100MB boot partition with its original Boot Configuration Data information.  The BCDEdit command can be used to modify this information.

If you use the BCDEdit /enum command you can get a picture of what is in the Boot Configuration Data store as you can see below on this machine.

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You will note there is no mention of HyperVisor.

To fix this use the following procedure

  1. Launch a Command Prompt with Administrative privileges
  2. Run the command bcdedit /set hypervisorlaunchtype auto
  3. Reboot – you will find the error is gone

After you’ve done that if you run the BCDEdit /enum command again you will see that you now have a HyperVisor section.

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Hope this helps someone else caught in this situation.

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This entry was posted on Monday, March 21st, 2011 at 6:00 am and is filed under Blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

4 Responses to “Hyper-V launch aborted due to auto-launch being disabled in the registry.”

  1. Ben Day Says:

    October 8th, 2011 at 6:41 am

    Thanks a ton! I restored my server on to new disks from backup and had tons of problems with the bootmgr and had to recreate all that boot stuff.

  2. Oca Says:

    January 29th, 2012 at 7:31 am

    This helped a bunch and worked like a charm thanks! It happened to me after mistakingly setting my active partition to another drive on my Hyper-V server then setting it back to C. That didn’t work right and the server wouldn’t boot. So i had to rebuild my BootMGR with a Windows 7 startup repair, that didn’t include the Hypervisor section. Ran this command from the dos prompt on my Hyper-V server and it rebooted and worked no problem.

  3. Wayne Small Says:

    January 29th, 2012 at 10:45 am

    Glad it helped!

  4. Error: Hyper-v launch aborted due to auto-launch being disabled in the registry | Microsoft Client and Cloud by Simon May Says:

    January 11th, 2013 at 3:56 am

    [...] a quick Bing brought up this excellent article from SBSFaq.com so I needed some more commands to enable Hyper-V which doesn’t happen [...]

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