Veeam Agent restore fails - boot drive not listed in bios

[daystrom]

Support Case 05699912

I have a windows 2012 r2 server that crashed, and seemed to have a successful restore using veeam agent 5.0.3, which I updated to about a week ago. Although the restore looked successful, the server fails to boot. What don't recall experiencing with previous restores is that the ssd boot drive is not listed in the ASUS bios boot devices. I've run cmd and can see that what should be the boot drive, c, is available. I am not sure what I should try next. The d drive, which should not be bootable, is listed.

[daystrom]

Further on this.
I have found that putting the restored boot drive (c, an ssd) into another pc, it boots successfully. Back in the original chassis, the same issues: the ssd boot drive is not listed in the bios.
The board and ssd worked together for several years. why would it now be invisible to the bios? Very strange. I'm not sure if it has anything to do with veeam at this point, but since I started off the qeustion here, I'll add this detal.

[daystrom]

I tried a known bootable ssd in the broken server; it also fails to appear in the bios. I guess it's an issue with the bios or the motherboard. As I noted above these drives are visible and appear fine if I view them from cmd when booted into windows repair mode. But how can they not be seen by the bios?

[daystrom]

This has turned out to be an issue with the bios, or something related to the sata system. Not fixed yet but it's not an issue having to do with veeam.

[Mildur]

Hello daystrom

Thanks for the update.
Maybe you can try creating a support case with your hardware vendors. If the disk is not visible in the BIOS boot manager, then bios/mainboard should be checked.

Best regards
Fabian

[daystrom]

Thank Fabian.
One aspect of this I'd like to pursue here is this:
A remaining puzzle is that while no sata ssd is currently visible to the bios, the original ssd clearly was at the time of the restore, else the restore would have had nothing to write to. If the power outage dinged the sata subsystem, which is my current idea, how could it have supported the restore to the sata ssd, which was the first thing I tried to recover?
The progression:
[1] power event
[2] restore from veeam agent to original sata ssd hdd, apparent success
[3] boot to restore fails
[4] bios shows no sata ssd drives. It does show the sata storage disk, which is a 4tb hdd.

Another, possibly related issue is that I've tried to restore the backup to another pc, and it reports something I don't recall seeing with the original restore: OS disk in backup uses MBR disk. This may cause boot issues on UEFI systems. I posted about that here:
veeam-agent-for-windows-f33/os-disk-in- ... 83436.html

[daystrom]

A bit of speculation on my part, with little input from the people at veeam who obviously know this stuff inside and out.
My guess is that the orignal pc was configured in an atypical configuration, with an MBR boot disk, and an UEFI bios. It appears that's not a supported scenario, or even a scenario that is supposed to work at all. However it did work here for a good number of years. Somehow, either the power event, or the restore from Veeam that followed, changed the formula in some manner, and the restored MBR boot disk could not be presented in the bios. Veeam stores the partition format in the backup, so all of my backups would restore as MBR. Even after converting a restored MBR disk to GPT, it would not appear in the list of bootable partitions in UEFI. I'd guess that was fixable but after a week of almost no input from anyone and so many attempts at x y z, and no easy fix I could find, I gave up on that.
As a result I'm installing the host from scratch.

[Moopere]

I think its probable that no-one responded because the first few posts seemed to almost certainly indicate a hardware failure. Granted its pretty strange state of affairs to not have a disk bootable yet still see it once the system is booted, but I think now, having read the whole thread, its likely that the disk -is- bootable and even seen by the bios, but what you mean is that its not presenting as a bootable partition by the UEFI bios.

If this is right I'd still expect to see the drive hardware itself showing up in the BIOS, just not in the boot list.

Given this was an install of 2012R2 and also given that the machine has worked for many years I would strongly suspect that the BIOS will support both UEFI and MBR. Perhaps the BIOS was reset by whatever event caused the machine to puke back to its defaults (or you did it?) which for a number of years was likely to be UEFI booting. You'd normally expect to be able to change this in the BIOS back to MBR and this would have provided you with a fairly straightforward recovery.

[Mildur]

Hi daystrom

Thanks.

My guess is that the orignal pc was configured in an atypical configuration, with an MBR boot disk, and an UEFI bios. It appears that's not a supported scenario, or even a scenario that is supposed to work at all.

I'm not able to test the behavior you reported.
But that is also what I can find out about booting from a MBR partition and UEFI bios. It has to be formatted as a GPT partition. I suggest using a supported configuration (GPT on UEFI bios).

Thanks
Fabian

[louyo]

If all else fails, I have had good success using boot-repair-disk. It is available as a live image. I think it is also available on the latest hiren liveCD.

[daystrom]

I didn't get notifications about replies here until this AM. Thanks everyone for responding.
I think I may understand what happened. If booting to the recovery media as a UEFI device means that agent will restore the OS as GPT partitions (thanks ITP-Stan in the other thread), this is what I think took place.
[1] While I had exposure to GPT and MBR when formatting drives, I was unaware that UEFI boots only to GPT.
[2] When installing the various OS from scratch in the past, all of my recent motherboards were UEFI, and therefore used GPT for the boot partition. I was unaware of this "choice" made by the various OS.
[3] The subject pc is UEFI only. When it was booted to the Agent recovery media, it either defaulted to using the USB mode or I chose it, instead of the UEFI mode.
[4] As a result (per my understanding of what ITP-Stan wrote) Agent restored the partitions as MBR.
[5] This means the bios could not boot to the restored boot drive, as it was MBR instead of the required UEFI.

There is a fair amount of conjecture in what I wrote. Can anyone confirm that it's a reasonable explanation for what I experienced? If confirmed I think I'll take the time to redo the restore, this time in UEFI boot, and see how it goes.

[daystrom]

I started a new restore, making sure to choose the UEFI boot from the recovery media, and got the original msg:
OS disk in backup uses MBR disk. This may cause boot issues on UEFI systems
I guess my theory is wrong. The MBR OS disk must be what is in the backup. Booting to UEFI recovery media doesn't seem to have changed how this would play out. It seems to imply that the pc was booting from MBR with UEFI and I thought that was not possible (or maybe just unsupported?)