Disabling the "System Recovery Options" window in Windows
Raymond Chen over at The Old New thing posted yesterday "Why did my systems reboot into the Recovery Environment and how do I prevent that from happening in the future?" where he explains (a) when/why Windows shows the "System Recovery Options" window and also (b) how to prevent it from doing so.
If you've got remote servers where you can't get to the console, disabling this might be an option to consider (although root-causing the reason for the failure is still going to be important!). Just on the off chance that his blog ever disappears (please, no!), or the links get broken by yet another move of how/where MSDN Blogs are hosted, I've copied the commands for enabling and disabling this below.
Disabling "System Recovery Options"
bcdedit /set {default} recoveryenabled No bcdedit /set {default} bootstatuspolicy IgnoreAllFailures
Enabling "System Recovery Options"
bcdedit /set {default} recoveryenabled Yes bcdedit /deletevalue {default} bootstatuspolicy
This was quite a timely posting as we had a server get a bit upset with itself yesterday and refuse to come back. My bet is that it's sat patiently waiting at this screen waiting for input...