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’t able to connect to it even after 15 minutes.
Once I have tried to restart the machine using CMD with shutdown -r -m -m command I got the following warning message:
hostname: A system shutdown is in progress. (1115)
So, in order to reboot a remote physical machine I had to download and use PSTools from HERE and kill the WinLogon process on the remote machine.
Once downloaded, extract contents of the .ZIP file and run Command Prompt from the same location.
Type the following command:
pskill \\hostname winlogon
where hostname is the name of the remote machine.
Once the process is killed the reboot process should continue and you’ll be able to access the remote machine again.
Comments are welcome!