<p>Recently I had an issue with one of our remote physical machines that hang during the reboot phase. Once I have initiated a reboot of the machine through the RDP connection after the system update I could see that I wasn&#8217;t able to connect to it even after 15 minutes.</p>
<p>Once I have tried to restart the machine using <strong>CMD</strong> with <strong>shutdown -r -m -m</strong> command I got the following warning message:</p>
<p><strong>hostname: A system shutdown is in progress. (1115)</strong></p>
<p><img class="alignnone wp-image-3930 size-full" title="A system shutdown is in progress. (1115)" src="https://www.wincert.net/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/shutdown-in-progress.png" alt="" width="550" height="221" /></p>
<p>So, in order to reboot a remote physical machine I had to download and use <strong>PSTools</strong> from <a href="https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/downloads/pstools" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">HERE</a> and kill the WinLogon process on the remote machine.</p>
<p>Once downloaded, extract contents of the <strong>.ZIP</strong> file and run <strong>Command Prompt</strong> from the same location.</p>
<p>Type the following command:</p>
<p><strong>pskill \\hostname winlogon</strong></p>
<p>where <strong>hostname</strong> is the name of the remote machine.</p>
<p>Once the process is killed the reboot process should continue and you&#8217;ll be able to access the remote machine again.</p>
<p><img class="alignnone size-full wp-image-3931" src="https://www.wincert.net/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/process-killed.png" alt="" width="518" height="191" /></p>
<p>Comments are welcome!</p>