Restore to virtual machine fails: the boot selection failed because a required device is inaccessible

[daystrom]

I am trying to restore a veeam agent backed up windows 7 virtual machine, something I've never tried before. What I did was:
- volume back up of system, C and D to a spare partition on the virtual hdd
- restored system, C and D to a new virtual hdd
- removed the original .vhd that the machine has been booting from
- windows boot fails with "the boot selection failed because a required device is inaccessible"

That error screen suggests booting to windows install disk and doing a repair. I attached a windows 7 pro iso, and booted to it. It asks me to select the OS to boot to, windows 7 is the only entry in the list, and then I get the "the boot selection failed because a required device is inaccessible" error again.

What have I missed in this process?

[daystrom]

This took care of itself. I restarted the host; tried the vm again, and this time it didn't ask what OS I wanted to boot to. It showed the "install windows" screen, with the option to repair, and the repair worked.

[Dima P.]

Hello daystrom,

Thank you for your post and glad to hear that you've found the solution. Based on your description it looks like an issue with the VM you've used to restore backup to. I'd recommend to use newly created blank vm as a target whenever you need to perform a Bare Metal Restore to a VM (that just helps to avoid possible conflicts with the existing VM configuration). Cheers!

[josues]

I encountered a similar issue while attempting to restore a Windows Server 2012 R2 VM from VMWare to Hyper-V 2022. After completing the restoration, the VM would not proceed past the boot process, displaying the error: inaccessible boot device.

Here are the steps I followed to successfully restore the VM.

1) Preferably, remove VMware Tools from the VM before restoration.

2) Convert GPT disk to MBR
For more information, visit: https://4sysops.com/archives/how-to-p2v ... -gpt-disk/

3) Delete initial partitions, except for the recovery partition.

4) Boot with the Windows Server 2012 R2 CD and activate the operating system partition:
> diskpart
diskpart
list disk
select disk 0
list partition
select partition 1
active
exit
<shutdown>

5) Boot with the Windows Server 2012 R2 CD to repair boot files:
bootrec /fixmbr
bootrec /fixboot
bootrec /rebuildbcd
<shutdown>

6) Boot with the Windows Server 2012 R2 CD and repair the BCD:

Using the same steps explained in Solution 1, enter the command prompt and type the following commands, pressing Enter after each one.

a) To boot from partition C: System
bcdboot c:\Windows /l en-us /s c: /f ALL

b) To boot from partition E: Recovery:
bcdboot e:\Windows /l en-us /s e: /f ALL

c) If booting fails, repair as follows:
‘cd / X: \ EFI \ Microsoft \’ where 'X:' is the drive letter of the boot partition
‘bootrec /fixboot’
‘ren BCD BCD.bak’

7) Create a Generation 1 machine in Microsoft Hyper-V 2022
- Add the disk as an IDE Controller.
- the BIOS option to boot via IDE.