If your Windows VM has become unresponsive or your disk becomes read-only, attempt to restart the VM through the portal or through the scripts. In many cases, this will resolve the issue and the VM will return to healthy.
However, if restarting your VM gets stuck in "stopping" indefinately, you can workaround this issue by removing the virtual machine (hitting delete in the portal) and re-deploying it using the same VHD disk that you used. You will also need to re-attach any data disks you were using as well. This will appear like a hard "reboot" to the Virtual Machine. This re-creation of the VM can be accomplished by going through the create VM process in the portal, selecting gallery, and from there selecting "My Disks."
Additionally, if you want to use the same DNS name, you will also need to delete the respective cloud service in the portal, along with the virtual machine, to release that previous DNS name reserved.
You can also import/export using powershell capabilities (which also saves aside the ports added and the data disks attached). Details on this can be found here:
Download the PowerShell Tools here:https://www.windowsazure.com/en-us/manage/downloads/
Documentation on configuring PowerShell can be found here:http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windowsazure/jj156055.aspx
Import/Export:
To export:
Export-AzureVM -ServiceName 'ServiceName' -Name 'VMName'-Path 'c:\folder\VM.xml'
Then, remove the VM:
Remove-AzureVM -ServiceName 'ServiceName' -Name 'VMName'
To import:
Import-AzureVM -Path 'c:\folder\VM.xml' |
>> New-AzureVM -ServiceName 'ServiceName' -Location 'loc'
More Details on using the import/export functionality, try this blog post:http://michaelwasham.com/2012/06/18/importing-and-exporting-virtual-machine-settings/
Corey