SOLUTION - Veeam Agent 13.0.3 Bare Metal Restore – Authentication Failed / LSA Error Solved Using Windows 10 Recovery Me

[hgordon2003]

I wanted to share the solution that worked for me in case it helps someone else.

Environment

Dell Pro Slim QCS1250
Windows 11
NVMe SSD
BIOS storage mode set to RAID On (Intel VMD)
Backup stored on a USB 4 TB Seagate drive
Veeam Agent 13.0.3.1220 recovery media consistently failed immediately after clicking Restore with:
"Authentication failed"
"The Local Security Authority cannot be contacted"

Creating new recovery media from another Windows 11 computer did not solve the problem.

What ultimately worked

I created recovery media on a Windows 10 laptop running Veeam Agent 13.0.1.1009 instead of using Windows 11 recovery media.

The Windows 10 recovery environment booted correctly, but initially it could not see the internal NVMe SSD. Only the USB backup drive appeared.

The reason turned out to be that the Dell BIOS was configured for RAID On (Intel VMD).

I copied the Intel VMD/RST driver (iaStorVD.inf) from an identical working Dell computer onto a USB flash drive.

During the restore wizard I selected:

Manual Restore → Customize Disk Mapping → Load Driver

Then I loaded iaStorVD.inf from the USB drive.

Veeam reported:

Driver has been installed successfully.

Immediately afterward the internal 476.9 GB NVMe SSD appeared and the partitions mapped correctly.

At that point I was able to continue with the restore.

Hopefully this saves someone else several hours of troubleshooting.

Thanks to everyone on the forum whose posts pointed me toward the Windows 10 recovery media workaround and the Intel VMD storage driver.

[david.domask]

Hi Harold, welcome to the forums.

Thanks for sharing your solution here, perhaps it was really about the specific storage driver indeed.

Based just on the error, I suspect in most cases it would be as outlined in our KB4885, but perhaps those that have a similar configuration will have success with your solution.