Restored root volume, OS fails to boot?

[georgi.yankov]

Hey folks.
I ran into an weird issue today.

Using Veeam BR 11a Community Edition (expired evaluation), with Windows Agents, for 2 Windows Server 2012 R2 VMs, with Agent v5.

The job created via the agents, and is a Volume level backup on the OS disks - both the system reserved partition and the NTFS one, where the installation resides.

I had to do a restore - doing it via the VBR GUI does not seem possible, since there was no "Machine" to be selected in the Restore Volume Wizard.
So i created a separate VMDK, with the same size as the original one, mounted it to the VM, initialized in the OS.
Then via the Agent > Restore Volume Wizard, proceeding with using the same layout.

All good, restores without issues.

The problem is, when i try to boot from that newly recovered VMDK.
It fails to find the boot records properly - returns 0x000000e error.
Its not a big deal, gets fixed in 5 minutes, with `bootrec` commands, but is a bit annoying.
Restoring via Export as disk (VMDK) works without issues.

Trying to find out what is the cause. I saw several related threads on the internet, where people point out, that if the disks are in MBR format, it could cause issues.
Are there such requirements for the Veeam Agent for Windows to be able to successfully backup/restore volumes, containing OS installations?
EDIT: Forgot to add, the Restore Point was an incremental backup.

[Dima P.]

Hello,

I had to do a restore - doing it via the VBR GUI does not seem possible, since there was no "Machine" to be selected in the Restore Volume Wizard.

Correct, volume level recovery is available to the machines with existing agent installation.

So i created a separate VMDK, with the same size as the original one, mounted it to the VM, initialized in the OS. Then via the Agent > Restore Volume Wizard, proceeding with using the same layout.

Hm, have you tried to run Instant Recovery from the agent backup to a VM instead? If you need to restore a single volume and mount it to the machine you can use Export Disk functionality.

[georgi.yankov]

Hello,

the main reason, why i did not try to use the Instant VM recovery, was due to the amount and types of network interfaces that are detected by the Agent.
We have like 4 or 5 virtual VPN ones created, that the Agent detects during the process, and i am not sure how to deal with those when asked to select the corresponding side on the VMWare networking.
Although, for the sake of testing, i will give it a try and see how it will work out.

[Dima P.]

Understood, thanks for giving it a try - let us know how it goes!