Talk about deja vuI! I was trying to access the Windows Recovery Environment inside a VM today. I needed to make some screenshots for a TechTarget story. Turns out the only way to do that is at the command line, using shutdown /r /o /f /t 00. But there’s a problem: this command doesn’t work inside RDP, nor when running an “Enhanced mode” session. Thus, accessing Hyper-V VM WinRE is a little trickier than it could — or should — be. Sigh.

Tricks to Accessing Hyper-V VM WinRE

Turns out, turning off “Enhanced mode” is key in this case. After I did that, not only did the shutdown command work as advertised from a local session, it also worked through RDP, too. Go figure!

I’m used to working on test and road machines via RDP from my production desktop, so this kind of thing comes as no surprise to me. But each time I find one of these bumps in the road to Windows success, I seem compelled to find said bump with my nether regions.

But at least I now know how to get right to WinRE inside a VM. All the other tips I found online — such as extending the timeout interval to give time to hit the F8 key, for example — required too much time and effort (and happy chance) to work. I like doing things through the command line because it’s straightforward and direct, and does not require getting lucky to achieve success.

And boy, howdy, isn’t that just the way things go here in Windows-World sometimes? I’ll take the command line every time, especially if chance (happy or not) must otherwise be involved. You should do likewise…