In some embodiments, the invention involves a system and method relating to autonomic boot recovery. In at least one embodiment, the present invention utilizes an embedded partition to safeguard boot information to be used in the event of a boot failure. An agent within a VMM may be similarly used. The embedded partition or VMM agent enables the preservation of “Last Known Good” boot configurations as well as providing an agent to provide self-healing to a platform which might have run into some type of corruption of critical data. In some embodiments a variety of intelligent filter mechanisms are enabled to allow a user to target the preservation of only certain types of configuration data. Other embodiments are described and claimed.