Some things have changed, so here is an updated tutorial with a few different Windows templates for you guys to use. Sorry about the delay, as I’ve been dealing with a lot recently that has delayed this over and over again.
Here is the old thread which mentions things about TOS, activation/licensing, etc that I won’t bother mentioning again here.
https://www.lowendtalk.com/discussion/comment/2190003#Comment_2190003
Step #1. Purchase a VPS or use one you already have. ALL DATA WILL BE ERASED AND FORMATTED AND WILL BE IRRECOVERABLE ONCE YOU PREFORM THIS PROCEDURE. You can purchase a new OVH VPS from here. https://www.ovh.com/us/vps/vps-ssd.xml
Step #2. Reinstall your VPS with CentOS 6 x64. If you are purchasing the VPS for the first time select CentOS 6 as the OS you want to use when checking out.
Step #3. Once the VPS has been activated, installed and set up by OVH and is visible in your manager, go ahead and click on “Rescue mode” and wait for the VPS to reboot into rescue mode. You will need patience, it’ll can unfortunately take anywhere from 5 minutes to 1 hour or longer to reboot into rescue mode and send you an email with the SSH login details.
Step #4. Install an SSH client like mRemoteNG or mobaXTerm if you are using windows or if you are on mac/linux open up a terminal and ssh root@(vps ip), this is assuming you’ve used SSH before. OVH has additional documentation on how to SSH into the live, netbooted recovery enviroment your VPS is now in.
Step #5. Once you are in the recovery-pro environment do the following commands in this order.
apt-get update
and press Y on any prompts you get, it is okay if you don’t get a prompt or get an error, continue to the next step..
apt-get install tmux
lsblk
and you’ll now see either one of two things,
vda 254:0 0 10G 0 disk
└─vda1 254:1 0 10G 0 part / vdb 254:16 0 10G 0 disk
├─vdb1 254:17 0 10G 0 part /mnt/vdb1
or you’ll see
sda 8:0 0 4.9G 0 disk
└─sda1 8:1 0 4.9G 0 part /
sdb 8:16 0 10G 0 disk
└─sdb1 8:17 0 10G 0 part /mnt/sdb1
Depending on which one you’ll see, vda/b or sda/b, you’ll need to select the appropriate template.
Step #6. Prepare for template installation. Run the following commands…
umount /mnt/vdb1
or if yours is sda/b instead of vda/b do
umount /mnt/sdb1
then
rm -rf /mnt/vdb1
or if yours is sda/b instead of vda/b do
rm -rf /mnt/sdb1
then
tmux
Now we are finally ready to restore the Windows dd image. Keep in mind this can and may take well over an hour, so leave this running and go do something else until it finishes.
Here are the current commands for the various Windows images.
If your lsblk displays vda/b use these templates:
Windows Server 2012 R2:
wget -O- ‘http://vpsfiles.mchaven.net/Server2012R2vdx.img.gz’ | gunzip -c | dd of=/dev/vdb
Windows Server 2016:
wget -O- ‘http://vpsfiles.mchaven.net/Server2016vdx.img.gz’ | gunzip -c | dd of=/dev/vdb
Windows Server 2003 R2 x64:
wget -O- ‘http://vpsfiles.mchaven.net/Server2003R2x64vdx.img.gz’ | gunzip -c | dd of=/dev/vdb
If your lsblk displays sda/b use these templates:
Coming soon!
It will take around an hour or two for this to complete, so just relax and go and do something else whilst that happens, don’t press or touch anything, you’ll know when it’s done when you see
root@rescue-pro:~#
and you are able to type stuff again, if you think it’s frozen give it at least 2 hours, if it still hasn’t completed by then reconnect and type “tmux attach-session” and you’ll most likely find it’s completed.
Once it’s done go back to your OVH manager and press the “Reboot my VPS” button, the VPS will take a bit to reboot, and once it’s done click on the KVM button and then “Open in a new window”.
You should now see the Windows login screen. Press the “control alt delete” button in the upper right hand corner of the noVNC window and type in TempPass123#* as the password, then you will be prompted to enter a new Administrator password for obvious security reasons, so enter yours and then press enter and if everything went well you should be booted to the desktop, and we are done! Additional IPs, an additional disk, etc will all work, you can set those up by following OVH’s own documentation under the Windows section.
Remote desktop connection is NOT enabled by default for security reasons, you can set that up yourself of course, and your VPS will obtain it’s dedicated IP via DHCP as that is how OVH has their system set up.
Lastly, please remember to open up run and type “diskmgmt.msc”, and extend the primary 10GB partition to fill up your entire disk. If you don’t do this you WILL be limited to 10GB no matter what your VPS has. For Server 2003 you need to do this a different way, I will post updated instructions for that specific template when I get a chance. Additionally for Server 2003 ignore the text file on the desktop with the link to the disk files needed for various things like installing services/roles, the new link is http://vpsfiles.mchaven.net/Server2003R2Disk1Files.zip