Windows 2012 on server on ESXI 6.0 U3 will not start

I think this is more likely an issue with the 2012 box itself rather than the hypervisor.

Have you tried booting it into safe move? Also have you made any changes to it recently?

Regards
Alex

I believe it was after an update. How can I forced Safe Mode?  Does the F8 key work for Win2012? Cannot get into the OS at all.

Yes it does,

apparently holding shift and pushing F8 repeatedly helps

Either that or

Boot to the Server 2012 disc and you can select Troubleshoot and then Command Prompt.  You type in the commands below and when you restart the server and get to the boot screen you won't see a "press F8 for Advanced options" but press F8 anyway and you will be brought to the advanced menu.

bcdedit /set {bootmgr} displaybootmenu Yes
bcdedit /set {bootmgr} timeout 15

OK. Did Safe Mode. Does the same thing. Starts for a few seconds, then starts shutting down.

So, you literally can't get into safe mode.....

Can you try the last known good configuration as well.

If that doesn't work, you're going to need to uninstall the updates most recently installed via the command line when you boot off the disk.

Regards
Alex

OK, after a couple of additional attempts at Safe Mode, it finally came up with Updates Failed, Reverting...  message. Server is back up now.

If this had not cleared up, however, the situation would be problematic.  How can one manually rollback or uninstall updates when Safe Mode is not accessible?

Normally windows will uninstall problematic updates, however you boot off the windows 2012 disk, get your command prompt up and type

WUSA /uninstall /KB:********

where the stars represent the number of the KB, omit the KB from the number. Incidentally, it's booting into safemode which almost certainly prompted the uninstall function.

Regards
Alex

Thank you