Problem restoring files from NT4-VM

[heavy]

Hi there,

i just had the joy of restoring files from a VM running Wndows NT4 - never done that before, but hey, should work, right?

My experience in short:
- FLR did not start - hung at starting a restore session.
- Restore of VMDK successfull, but Windows 2008R2 and 2012R2 Servers crashed when VMDK was added to them
- Full Restore worked, machine booted, i could retrieve the files that way.

So before diving into deeper analysis of logs, my questions are:
- anyone experienced or even tried this before?
- from what i read, any guest os is supported, as long as it runs in vSphere, is that correct?
- are there any restrictions what filesystem can be used? (ok i really forgot to check the disk when the machine finally booted an we could retrieve the files)

Thanks in advance for any hints or experience on this topic. Even a reply like "this is expected behavior" is fine.
heavy

[jmmarton]

I haven't touched NT4 in any fashion in ages. I'm not sure if it's supported. All we list for platforms is that FAT, FAT32, NTFS, and ReFS are supported filesystems for FLR for Windows VMs.

https://helpcenter.veeam.com/docs/backu ... tml?ver=95

What's more important is the process we use to mount the disk, and we use something called Virtual Disk Driver (VDK) to do it.

https://helpcenter.veeam.com/docs/backu ... tml?ver=95

This is the first time I've looked into it. It appears all VDK does is mount a VMDK within Windows but itself doesn't do anything with the guest filesystem contained within the VMDK.

https://github.com/sherpya/vdk

Considering that you mentioned restoring the VMDK to both 2008R2 and 2012R2 caused them to crash says to me there's something about modern Windows that doesn't like the old NT4 drive you're trying to access. That would explain why you can't get FLR to work either. My guess is that you'll either need to restore the entire VM which you did and it worked, or you'll need to use Instant VM Recovery to boot the VM from the repo without actually restoring it. That would at least give you access to the filesystem so you can grab data off of it.

You might also be able to do FLR using the "Linux - Other OS" option. I don't know if the Linux distro in our helper appliance can mount such an old version of NTFS (or FAT if that's what you're using) but it could be worth a shot. If that form of FLR comes up without a problem then you can just use the "copy to" option to copy the files to wherever you need them.

Joe