VeeamZip or replicate 2012R2 fails with VBR 9.5 U4a

[Didi7]

Hello everybody,

I have a strange problem that's bugging me the whole day. I needed to replicate a Windows 2012R2 VM from a stand-alone ESXi host running v5.5 Build 2068190 to a clustered ESXi host running v6.5 Build 7388607 but that failed, the VM could not be started at the target. Windows 2012R2 came up with a BSOD INACCESSIBLE_BOOT_DEVICE, the OS tried to fix the boot error and later came up with the error ...

Windows failed to start. A recent hardware or software change might be the cause.
Status: 0xc000000e
Info: A required device isn't connected or can't be accessed.

Using the OS DVD and the command prompt to fix the error with ...

bootrec /fixboot
bootrec /fixmbr
bootrec /rebuildbcd
bootsect.exe /NT60

or with startrep.exe didn't fix the problem. The media is somehow write protected and the infos from bcdedit differ from those from the original VM.

Is this a known problem with ESXi v5.5 Build 2068190 ?

I need to add, that I tried VeeamZip to backup the original 2012R2-VM on the ESXi 5.5 host and restored it under a different name into the same ESXi 5.5 host again and booting the restored 2012R2-VM fails as well. A bug with Veeam 9.5 U4 or U4a (tried diffent Veeam-servers) or a bug in ESXi 5.5 Build 2068190 ?

I am currently copying the *.vmdk and *-flat.vmdk via WinSCP and hopefully I can boot the system later in ESXi 6.5 Build 7388607.

Best regards,
Didi7

[nielsengelen]

It could be related to one of the latest Windows update causing this. Since you are saying that it happens on both replica and the backup, it feels like this is caused by the guest and not as much in the VMware infrastructure.

Can u check on the live VM when the last updates where installed? It could be one of the recent ones is the cause of the issue.

[Didi7]

Hello nielsengelen,

manually picking the *.vmdk boot-disk and injecting it into the new ESXi 6.5 environment solved the problem, but I also had problems with the data disks, one of being blank in the target environment, so I had to backup this single disk with Veeam again and injected it (Veeam restore) into the new VM under ESXi 6.5, but both data disks were hidden as well. So more strange problems took me a lot of time. Every reboot, the data partitions had no drive letter. Finally, after finding out how to unhide those partitions with diskpart-utility, I could reboot the system as often as I wanted and all 3 partitions appeared with their correct drive letter. The system is now moved.

The original VM in the ESXi 5.5 environment is still available and I found out, that the last update had been installed on the 8th of April 2019. Only KB4499408, KB4499151, KB890830 and KB4481252 wasn't installed.

So, which Windows Update for Windows Server 2012R2 causes this problem and is there a fix available?

Regards,
Didi7

[foggy]

We haven't seen this behavior, so we cannot comment on the particular update (or an update at all, this was just a guess). Haven't you performed any changes to the VM configuration recently?

[Didi7]

No, the VM configuration didn't change at all.

Regards,
Didi7

[foggy]

If you encounter this behavior again, feel free to let our engineers know.

[Didi7]

Ok, will do that.

I have some more strange behavior found. The 2 data disk, which I restored from VeeamZip-Backup were not only hidden, so that I needed to use diskpart to make them visible again and to see them with drive letters after reboot. Today somebody noticed that files could not be modified or written on both data disk, because the volumes were marked read-only too.

So I deep-dived into diskpart again and found out how to remove the read-only settings for both volumes.

Before changing both volume to read-write, quiescing the VM was not possible from vCenter, now this works as well and of course data can be written or modified again.

I already transferred a lot of VMs with Veeam and with VeeamZip or Quick Migration, but this time this didn't work at all.

As a side effect, I know more about how to use DISKPART-utility in such cases

Regards,
Didi7