Repairing non-booting Windows 2012 R2 and others

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If you're stuck in a "Preparing Automatic Repair" boot loop that always takes you back to the blue screen of unhelpful menu options:

 Disable Automatic repair

Get to the recovery command prompt

bcdedit /enum

 Get the name of the Windows entry (likely to be {default}

 bcdedit /set {default} recoveryenabled No

 Reboot

 Now instead of getting into the loop of a failing repair it'll show you the real problem that it's failing to fix. This is likely to be a corrupt file. In my case it was c:\windows\system32\drivers\cng.sys which I copied from a working server that was at the same patch level.

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